Blog-flogging at 35,000 feet. Yep - someone let a Brooklynite on the plane.

OMG! Ponies!

It doesn't really matter, they charge $13 for wi-fi service which for me is a lot considering my laptop battery lasts 20 minutes, and on AA there are only 3 routes that carries gogo.
so basically at this point, chances are it will not bother a lot of people...

j1234

I resisted for a while to invest $300 for over-the-ear noise reduction headphones. Now, I HAVE to... thank you very much Giz...

DeLarge

Yeah, because it's just so damn hard to lean over and say "Would you kindly turn that off?"

Dunny0, Team T/A

Check out my blog's new article "How To Karate Chop The Vocal Chords Of Someone Making In-Flight VoIP Calls"

Hiphopopotamus

Aaargh! Flying was my one refuge from the mindless chatter!

"No, I'm calling you from the plane. FROM THE PLANE! ... THE PLANE! ... AWESOME! What are you watching?"

dc-united

Thanks Gizmodo, now while we're stuck in an uncomfortable seat flying 35,000 in the air we get to hear assholes talk to other assholes.

They banned in-flight phone calls for a good reason!

DMF

I would pay good money to see Dom Joly make a call on a plane with a giant iPhone.

dingus

@Dunny0, Team T/A:

To the average american? Thats almost unheard of.

You'd ether be ignored or told to mind your own business, end of story.

(don't take that too seriously)

Rob C

That's it. Now they are going to add laptops and PDA's to the banned-in-flight lists.

Finally.

ViperBorg

as if twitter wasn't annoying on its own, now it you tell everybody how many peanuts you had in-flight or what the engines sounds like... !

theprime

Good luck trying to get enough bandwidth for VoIP. I imagine the lines will be saturated with P2P and YouTube downloads.

GotMex?

So I can make phoners but I still have turn off my ipod or psp during takeoff or landing because it's going to crash the plane. When will this 1980's rule end? I think the stewardesses (yes stewardesses -they don't attend to a damn thing) rely on this rule to assert their hatred of the passengers to yell at us.

SeattleTed

i am all for the ability of making calls from anywhere at anytime but this should be like the movies... yeah your phone works but you dont need to call anyone, unless it is absolute, and not talking about "honey my flight is going to be 5 minutes late so dont leave the house yet to save money on parking" type calls, im talking "houston we have a problem" type calls, but it's a great advancement in communications

purple-pillows

Okay... just to piss you all off, I'm going to use VOIP on Skype on a MacBook Air with Ubuntu installed to call my blog-happy hipster friends "Good-Bye Plane".

Again and again and again...

OMG! Ponies!

I hope the air marshalls come and put some smack down on your ass if you use voip in flight.

Though all they really need to do is have a TOC that prevents voip, you use it via hack and you get banned. Permanently.

1roll20s

Like hell, John. You get to spill your drink on them right after I'm done strangling them with my headphones.

RaptorCK

i still think boing should have continueds their connexxxion service, in the long run they would have made money, as all major US airlines get their internet fix,... and the satellite based service is much better than airgo which is cell tower based....

smokeonit

and i 'm looking back @ my lufthansa trans-atlantic flights using conexxion to do ichatAV video.audio with friends & colleagues;-)

smokeonit

if you use a VPN tunnel you should be able to do video and audio via skype/ichatAV anyways, no matter what the network router is trying to block;-)

smokeonit

Another way to go around their ban is the use of hamachi and ventrilo for voice. Put both computers on secure 128bit connection that connects both computers over the internet to see each other as in a local lan. :)

biofreak

@DeLarge: I just picked up those bose headphones.. and holy crap. Worth every dime.

shockwaver

@shockwaver: I just picked up those bose headphones.. and holy crap. Worth every dime. yeah, but they only make the asshats making voip over vpn calls that much easier to hear. I would definitely go apeshit if anyone around me on a plane was doing that. gah.

doofusgumby

@sxr7171: "useless" = "unless"

sxr7171

Everybody wants to go nuts over someone having a conversation, I mean whatever happened to common etiquette? Let people make their calls quietly and discreetly.

The problem is that most people are loudmouths and they can't be trusted to talk quietly on the ground, in coffee shops, restaurants, or parks.

That is the real problem. Still, I think people should use silent methods of communication useless a voice call is really necessary.

I guess pricing it really high would be the easier than trusting people to use any form of judgment.

sxr7171

You can't ban talking, whether it's into a little box or into thin air. I don't care how annoying you think it is, having your constitutional rights violated should bother you more.

I'm getting sick of the "United-States-of-My-Personal-Preferences" concept that people think is valid. It's not, and you are allowed to be annoyed, and your also allowed to annoy them back. Grow up, stop legislating morality. It's always an epic fail, and it's a lot harder to get freedom back after you let people take it away the first time.

People don't mind talking at Baseball games, public events, rock concerts, or any other forum, but when someone is on the phone talking to someone other than you, it's the end of the world.

So the "problem" is not that someone else is on the phone, or that their a loudmouth (according to your standards), or that they have bad manners. The problem is that Americans have come to think they get to legally ban every little thing that annoys them, or anyone else. I think you need to look long and hard at the trend we are setting, before you wake up one day and get YOUR rights restricted for someone else's "convenience" just because he got enough clowns to agree with him.

If you think the law needs to conform to your personal preferences, you're not "getting" what it means to be an American, and what freedom really means. Go read the constitution, because talking to a "present day" average American is a disgrace when compared with any self respecting civil libertarian.

The founding fathers would be disgraced at the very notion of what is being put fourth here, this kind of rubbish need only exist in "nanny states" like Singapore, or apparently America if any of the weak-willed cowardly "sheeple" commenting here have anything to do with it.

martin0641

Not only is this non-enforceable due to my ability to route my VPN over port 80 if I feel like it, but there's nothing that stops me from dictating War & Peace into a recording device.

This kinda crap makes me want to just talk to myself, passing laws you cant enforce (and should not even try to, for reasons of liberty and freedom which are the foundation of this nation) is a sign of moral cowardliness and a weak mind.

It's like people WANT a bubble wrapped world where everything is P.C. and no one is EVER offended and it rains cotton candy and things are JUST SOOOOPER.

Our congress is talking about this while we're in the middle of a war, with a crumbling infrastructure, and major budget issues. American priorities are so misplaced, and the public so easily manipulated, that I can't think of any other nation that has has such potential for greatness that just let it all slip away, one law at a time, by sheeple, for sheeple, at the expense of the rest of us who actually represent the spirit of our nation as originally founded.

We need more patriots. Real ones.

martin0641