Originally Posted by
sbrower
Genuine question to those who have these restrictions.
1. When you go to dinner you don't leave your laptop in your hotel room?
2. When you go to the gym, you carry your laptop from station to station?
3. When you go to the pool you have the laptop on the deck near your hands?
4. If you are single you take your laptop with you to other people's rooms if you have a meaningful encounter, which means you had the laptop with you in the bar when you met the person?
The key part to my statement was "when in transit," presumably because there is a higher risk of loss/theft when our laptops are all packed up and we are in public/crowded spaces. There are other specific guidelines around what we have to do in instances where we can/should be separated from our equipment.
1. Must be powered off (HDD is encrypted) and stored in the in-room safe.
2. Same as
#1 .
3. Same as
#1 .
4. Same as
#1 . But I'm not single so I wouldn't know.
The policy is actually quite reasonable, sensible, and well-intentioned. Checking a bag with a laptop in it for an int'l flight is essentially putting your equipment in the hands of an unknown person/persons for an extended period of time where it will be easy to access and also out of your sight. If someone steals the laptop from my hotel room, I'll know within a few hours at most. If someone steals it from a checked bag (or if the bag is just lost), I won't even know what city it was last in and it could be nearly a full day before I know it's gone.
Originally Posted by
whitearrow
Why all laptops and not just large ones (how much explosive could you possibly fit in a thin and light laptop and still have it turn on, much less an e-ink Kindle or an iPad)? Will this ban include noise-cancelling earbuds? What about "electronics" that have no battery, like hard drives, flash drives, a Roku, etc? What about my 1 inch long Fitbit or my one inch squre iPod nano? What about my watch, for that matter? (Does anyone have a watch without some kind of battery in it?) How small do the items have to get before this is just insanely stupid?
Why just international flights or flights from Europe? Won't the terrorists just switch their plans to domestic flights?
Was just about to post both of these points. I wonder how much other items like NC headphones will be impacted. Can't wait for my next 8 hour flight fiddling with the crappy headsets the airline provides.
And we already have people in this thread and my office talking about just taking different routings back into the US. It's stupid.
Originally Posted by
notquiteaff
The easiest and cheapest would presumably be to destroy (erase?) the hard disk (they have backups in the cloud, right?) and then check the laptops.
I suppose that's an option, but again, a lot of wasted effort for a solution to a problem that only exists because of pure stupidity. There's also the lost productivity of anything we could be doing on the flight itself.
I suppose at least satellite wifi congestion won't be as bad anymore...