They have completely lost it now!!

[Skipjack]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/07/travel/ai ... ?hpt=tr_c2

So, I have a high powered desk top replacement laptop that has had a bricked battery for years. It is working find otherwise and since it is a DTR, I don't care about the battery much. It is mainly a portable workstation for me. What am I supposed to do now? I need the thing for work! This is beyond idiotic, stupid, moronic and assholish! I cant believe that they let them get away with it. I also cant believe how little media attention this latest in a long list of TSA fails has been getting. I guess people are just giving up.
This has to stop! Someone has to stop them!
This is turning into a sort of mass psychosis! I think one could write a psychological study on this. If someone had suggested something like this 20 years ago, he would have been committed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

[Skipjack]

If they really want to improve peoples security, then how about they do something about people driving under the influence. Installing breathalyzers into every car would be cheaper than the TSA nonsense and would prevent 10,000 deaths in the US alone every year! That is 4 times the deaths in 9/11 EVERY YEAR! That would be a massive improvement in transportation security and it would be comparably cheap.

"According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 33,561 people died in traffic crashes in 2012 in the United States (latest figures available), including an estimated 10,322 people who died in drunk driving crashes, accounting for 31% of all traffic deaths that year."

[GIThruster]

I think you're acting hysterical. It makes perfect sense to pay attention to whether the electronic device works and if not, why not. A battery is in most devices, large enough to house a potent explosive, and if there is no requirement that a laptop's battery works, there is no way to tell for sure it's a battery.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or a skyscraper.

Check your batteries. You do not have some unalienable right to carry explosive look a likes around.

[Skipjack]

I think you're acting hysterical. It makes perfect sense to pay attention to whether the electronic device works and if not, why not. A battery is in most devices, large enough to house a potent explosive, and if there is no requirement that a laptop's battery works, there is no way to tell for sure it's a battery.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or a skyscraper.

Check your batteries. You do not have some unalienable right to carry explosive look a likes around.

1. I suggest you read the article and watch the video. You obviously do not understand what this means. This is the only explanation I have for the logical fallacies in your comment.
2. Again, what do you do when your laptop battery is bricked? Buy a new laptop? Who is going to give me the money for that? The TSA?
3. Oh and the only ones acting hysterical are the ones making regulations like that.

[GIThruster]

I glanced at the article. Are you telling me you don't support regulations that require only batteries that work be in laptops? Why would anyone want terrorists to be able to bring bombs into the airport by dressing them as batteries? This is a no-brainer. So what don't I understand?

[Skipjack]

I glanced at the article. Are you telling me you don't support regulations that require only batteries that work be in laptops? Why would anyone want terrorists to be able to bring bombs into the airport by dressing them as batteries? This is a no-brainer. So what don't I understand?

Because it is the government forcing me to buy something that I do not need (to bring an old favorite republican argument)
Also you could equally dress a bomb as a WORKING battery, if you wanted to. So the whole idea is completely idiotic to begin with. It is just another way for the government to exercise power over the population with a useless and ultimately pointless regulation that will further disrupt air travel and make it even more annoying and costly for the bottom 99.9% than it already is.
The top 0.1% of course are exempt anyway, since there is no security for charter flights.
Also there is no proof that any of the new regulations introduced since 9/11 have improved the safety for passengers in any way. As I said, mandatory breathalyzers in all cars would cost less, would be less annoying and would actually safe lives (10,000 a year, in the US alone and then not even counting the billions in property damage and injuries). Even if terrorists managed to blow up an airplane once a year, it would barely make a dent in airplane safety statistics, in comparison.

[hanelyp]

I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to I could (perhaps with the assistance of a chemist) devise a bomb that could slip through common airport security.

Or to cause trouble another way, devise innocent items that trigger false alarms when they hit security.

[GIThruster]

Sorry but that is just an irrational argument for an irrational position. If your laptop's battery doesn't work, you should not be able to bring it onto a plane, because it poses serious risk through the possibility it is a bomb. Note too, we should not be allowing box cutters on planes since people have proven they are enough afraid of them to sit and wait until their plane goes boom into a building.

Don't even get me started about TSA. I worked with those folks for a year and that problem is vastly underestimated. Whether or not car breathalizers could have a greater impact than appropriate TSA protocols is so not the issue Skippy one wanders what you had to smoke to get to that strained conclusion. It's like saying we ought to allow bombs on planes because we don't all wear surgical masks during flue season--just totally whacked.

Buy a new battery and stop moaning. Sheesh.

[Skipjack]

If your laptop's battery doesn't work, you should not be able to bring it onto a plane, because it poses serious risk through the possibility it is a bomb.

Very, very, very low likelihood. Idiotically low likelihood. There has not been a single case where someone used a battery as a bomb. Whether a device turns on or not is not an indicator of whether the battery contains a bomb or not. Also they do already have bomb sniffers and Xrays that we spent billions on. It would be more useful to simply use and improve those. It is simply idiotic, period!

Note too, we should not be allowing box cutters on planes since people have proven they are enough afraid of them to sit and wait until their plane goes boom into a building.

Unsubstantiated. It worked for 3 flights on 9/11 because until then the official policy was to comply with the demands of airplane hijackers. Once people figured out what was going to happen, they resisted as can be seen on flight 93. It is reasonable to assume that 9/11 would not happen anymore because of changes in policy and people resisting hijackers.

Whether or not car breathalizers could have a greater impact than appropriate TSA protocols is so not the issue Skippy one wanders what you had to smoke to get to that strained conclusion. It's like saying we ought to allow bombs on planes because we don't all wear surgical masks during flue season--just totally whacked.

First of all, no one is talking about allowing bombs. It is about allowing empty batteries.
Either way, one is an actually tangible problem with a serious number of deaths, the other is a case of mass psychosis, without a statistically relevant amount of deaths. Yes even the deaths from 9/11 are not statistically relevant to air travel safety and they pale in comparison to the 10,000 deaths EVERY YEAR from drunk drivers. One is a real threat to public safety, the other is paranoid schizophrenia!

[GIThruster]

One is a real threat to public safety, the other is paranoid schizophrenia!

Are you talking about plane hijackings or the flu? In 2009 more than a million people died of H1N1. If we just force everyone to wear a mask during flu season, imagine all the lives that could be saved!

You're making a terrible argument for why you shouldn't go buy a battery. Should we just take up a collection? I mean really, is it worth all the whining to save yourself the cost of a working battery?

[choff]

There was a how to video the other year about the harmful devices you could create from purchases in the duty free store after going through security.

[Betruger]

Maybe our current large airliner paradigm's vulnerability to guerilla warfare is unfixable. At least without some SF-ish scanning of pax and cargo.

[D Tibbets]

Two points:
I suspect the "Dead Battery" packaging of a bomb is real. It has been found, and the regulation is a response to that.

I just tested my laptop and the battery can be removed without interupting funtion provided it is plugged in to the wall outlet. If your battery is dead, dispose of it properly and go on your marry way. If the inspectors say you have to have a funtioning charged battery installed in all of your devices, the situation is different. I suppose a laptop without a battery cannot be tested quickly to demonstrate it is a funtional device and not a package for a bomb. It would need to be plugged into an outlet. If that is too much work for the inspectors, you are out of luck. For that matter there is no reason a small bomb could not be inserted into an otherwise functional computer, perhaps replacing the DVD drive or half of a battery. It doesn't stop a bomb threat entirely, only makes it a little more difficult to implement.

Dan Tibbets

[ladajo]

I have to agree with Skippy on this one.
It is idiotic.
They tried this before, making you turn your stuff on, and the resulting backups were impossible to manage.
Making rules like this play right into the hands of the terrorists.

Two key points:

Also you could equally dress a bomb as a WORKING battery,

Or to cause trouble another way, devise innocent items that trigger false alarms when they hit security.

There is way more to Terror than the attacks. It is really about the threats. And the more you put the threats in the GenPop's faces, the more the terror campaign perpetuates. Terror is at its heart, an information war, nothing more.
But, for the record, terror campaigns rarely succeed. And when they did (more or less count them on your fingers), it was not in the intended way of the perpetrators. The outcomes generally were for the worse, and did not provide sought goals culmination for the insurgents.

[Skipjack]

One is a real threat to public safety, the other is paranoid schizophrenia!

Are you talking about plane hijackings or the flu? In 2009 more than a million people died of H1N1. If we just force everyone to wear a mask during flu season, imagine all the lives that could be saved!

You're making a terrible argument for why you shouldn't go buy a battery. Should we just take up a collection? I mean really, is it worth all the whining to save yourself the cost of a working battery?

Good point, the flu is a much bigger threat to public safety than terrorism is. The mask thing is of course BS, but a large government sponsored vaccination campaign might do the trick!
In fact, I would argue that there are many, many much bigger threats to public safety than terrorism on airplanes. E.g. I would argue that energy research would improve public safety much more, since the energy crisis, we are facing is probably the biggest threat to our society in the 21st century. Everything else is insignificant in comparison.