Working in industry is great for that. In my previous job, I used to work on industrial tightening systems, and I was sent abroad to a client based on the fact that I was one who could actually lift and install the system (50kg). When testing the system, you have to lift it, use it, install it, abuse it, etc. Getting back to the desk actually feels good! Right now I'm doing geoexploration systems, I'm a little less active, but when the systems are deployed onto 20km x 30km sites, you have to have a minimal test site to imitate what the end client will do, so I get to walk a lot between the different systems and test beds. All of this being a C/ASM developer.

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.

I'm not surprised, not at all. The A320 ELAC uses 3 68k chips, and the A320 SEC uses an 80186 and even an 8086 chip. Why? For lots of reasons. Basically, it doesn't require billions of instructions per second, it doesn't need to access gigabytes of memory, and most importantly, they are proven chips that have gone through years of testing, and they are relatively simple. At the time they were complicated, granted, but they were still within reach of severe quality control. Remember the problems Intel had with the Pentium and floating point calculations? Nothing serious, but still... The chip was so complex that problems crept into the design phase, and at 38000 feet, you do not want problems. To cite a fellow Slashdotter above, (thanks tekrat), Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks. Enough design faults have crept into aeronautical design, so I can only imagine the space sector. NASA used to program everything in 68k because they were reliable, simple, fast enough, and because they had lots of really, really good engineers that knew every single aspect of the chips. Don't get me wrong, I love todays chips, and i7s look sexy, but with a TDP of 130W for the Extreme Edition chips, they just add problems. Running at 3.2GHz, with over a billion transistors, you are just asking for trouble. At those speeds and heat, problems do happen, the system will crash. Ok, not often, but with mission critical systems, just once is enough. Did anyone seriously expect the shuttle to run quad-cores with terabytes of RAM?

This is France, the government pays for just about anything, and then they end up with a huge hole in their budget. They very fact that people pay nothing makes them irresponsible, since they don't even thing about what they do. Oh, yeah, just shove those pills on the bill, maybe I'll need them, maybe I won't. They see the doctor as much as they want, since 99.5% gets paid back, and it clogs the system up. Getting an "urgent" appointment can be hard form some people, depending on the amount of people around, and the amount of doctors available. France is beginning to change, as in now you have to pay a Euro every time you go to a doctor, and if you go to a specialist without a doctor's consent, you pay about 70% of the end bill. It does make a few people think, but IMHO, a lot of people still abuse the system, because it is just to damned easy to do.

Very good point. I'm an open source guy myself, and the "techie" of the crowd (as in Hey! Will you fix my computer?). I've worked with Linux, Windows, Mac and even others, like Solaris, HPUX and a few others I can't even remember off hand. IMHO, what kills discussion are the evangelists, and the computing world is full of them. We like to bash around Mac users because of their "Mac is better than anything else" attitude, and for some domains, they are. I used to work for NEC Computers, and every single desktop and server was a NEC, except for the marketing and graphics departments, where they used Macs, naturally. Graphics et al. Everything depends on your use, and need. I'm a Linux fan, but I've suggested that people use Windows or Mac instead of Linux. Yes, you can do it with Linux, but in your case, it makes sense using something else. Everyone has a particular need, a particular configuration. The computer evangelists are doing more harm than good, and they are also a reason why I quit my job as an iPhone developer. The iPhone is sweet and sexy, but the people I worked for could have 4-hour arguments as to why Mac was better than anything else, no matter what. Parent is right, and that comes from a Linux user, one who thinks that other platforms have their place. No system is perfect, no strategy is ideal, otherwise we'd all be using the same thing by now. The very fact that we aren't just shows that there are huge differences.

Your argument is sound, but there are exceptions. At home I have a PC hooked directly into the TV via HDMI, playing 5.1 (not 7.1) natively. No 24" monitor. The girlfriend plays World of Warcraft on it when she doesn't want to bring out the lappy. 1920x1080 resolution, nice fast graphics, and a wireless keyboard and mouse to drive it all. Granted, consoles are a LOT easier, as in "plug and play", and setting up the PC does take a while, and for most things a PC is overkill for a home TV, but it can be done, and isn't that difficult. That doesn't stop us from having a PS3 plugged in, which does everything the PC does, but is just easier (and faster to boot). The PS3 is sexy, and "just works", the PC is big, heavy, ugly and doesn't quite fit behind the TV. However, for some people, plugging a PC into a TV is the "norm".

Which is why I'm getting paid more and more to do assembly... People might think that they don't need it, but sometimes, you can't let a compiler do things for you, there are things that even might C cannot do. Activate a cache on an ARM, shave off a few microseconds on an interrupt... This is something that we are forgetting, and it is a shame, since sooner or later, everything runs as assembly. It would terrify me to do work on a mobile phone or on an embedded device and not know exactly what is happening. When things go wrong, plug in a JTAG debugger and look. Now when I see young engineers come in, there are 2 categories. Either they don't know assembly, but they are curious, and willing to learn, or they don't know assembly, and really don't care. Either way, low level debugging jobs arrive in my inbox directly.

I knew somebody with that; he could read words, like just about anyone, but each letter had a colour. Fill a whitebord with hundreds of letter "O"s, and add one Q, and he could find it instantly, it was the letter that was a different colour from the rest. His parents remember him saying "Hey, I didn't know you could change the colour of F, just by adding a line!" (i.e. turning it into E). That was their wake up call, and he was diagnosed with synaesthesia a few weeks later.