Tuesday Evening Links

Guessing the FAA can trust the pilot to shut off the radios more than a passenger. I bet its impossible to detect an operating iPad outside of a shielded lab when all its radios are off. if you where to set an ipad in this room I am in all radios off I bet any detection gear would pick up the motor in my ceiling fan first.

On the upside, if you ever get a call from a politician, you can just say loudly "I CAN'T TALK NOW, I'M DRIVING" and hang up.

We get about the same level of attention from them now, anyway.

Here's the key bits: They only disallow using electronic devices during takeoff and landing up to around ~10K feet. Likely the unseen reason for the policy that wasn't used in favor of a more believable and solid reason of possible electronic interference is to actually keep passengers alert and not nose glued into an electronic device when the takeoff and landing portions of the flight are the most likely to have an accident or failure of some kind.

A nanny state wouldn't be necessary if Americans weren't so stupid in the first place.

Writing new laws is what legislatures do, freedom or sanity be damned. A kid somehow drowns in MA and his guilt-ridden father gets a law passed to get kids to "swim" in life-vests at camps.

But Americans tolerate all kinds of danger, death and even mayhem in the name of personal freedom. We insist on it, in fact, and policymakers listen. The U.S. political system routinely prioritizes freedom over safety.

It would take a stoic governor out of touch with voter preferences and unconcerned about re-election to sign an actual cell-phone ban into law

But the cell phone has practically become standard equipment in most American cars, and there's virtually no chance the government will pry it out of there.

So, where does it end? I'll tell you - the Google dream of a machine driven car with ZERO human control after plugging in the destination. And all in the name of trying to remove ANY human risks at all from life.

Google has been granted a patent for driverless car technology, which can fully take over the control of a vehicle from a human driver.

This full-fat version of cruise control uses web functionality to trigger the automated driving tech, with one of the images which goes alongside the patent showcasing what seems to be a massive QR code embedded into a road.

It seems that once a driver of one of Google's automatic cars drives over the QR code – or reference indicator, as it is called in the patent – the car then takes over the controls.

Google has been looking into the idea of driverless cars for a while now and even outlined its proposal for an automatic car in its last Zeitgeist, where Larry Page explained: "It's an area that I've had some interest in since I was a grad student. It seemed pretty practical actually, I mean you think that driving a car is hard but it is not actually that hard for a computer if [it] has good data about what's about it."