Re: airline travel with hitech gear? (a bit offtopic)
Am Son, 2003-03-16 um 20.07 schrieb Tony Godshall:
> On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 01:00:47PM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> > From: "Russell Coker" <russell@coker.com.au>
> >
> > > On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:15, Joris wrote:
> > > > I know it has little to do with debian on laptops (altough a non-windows
> > > > OS booting meight look suspecious to customs), but:
> > >
> > > You must have some charge in your battery when going through the security
> > > checks as they will want to see the machine running.
> >
> > The last time I flew (Christmas) they didn't care about powering it up - but
> > they actually used some kind of sniffer. I always thought it would be trivial
> > to fill a laptop with explosives and enough ROM & battery to make it look like
> > it was working. So this time they didn't care that it 'worked', and actually
> > checked for bombs. Still, just-in-case, make sure it will boot before going
> > through. That time I'd just spent an hour getting the damn thing to start
> > because I was having trouble with a flakey touchpad, and they didn't even want
> > me to turn it on :-)
> >
> > > Often they will wait for it to "boot Windows" and you have to explain to them
> > > that is never going to happen and that it runs Linux.
> >
> > Never had that happen in Canada.
>
> I fly every week or two in the US and went to Europe and
> Mexico too in the last year. Never had to turn on my laptop
> but they usually do the cotton wipe explosive-residue detect
> thing to my laptop, its bag, and sometimes my shoes. They
> used to want to see stuff turned on, but appears to have
> become a thing of the past.
>
> My laptops have gone through xray lots of times but the only
> things they have failed from are not attributable to that.
> The greater hazards for a laptop are physical, IMHO.
Have you ever seen the explosion of shortened battery packs? Several
companies I.E. Dell had to call back battery-packs. When a battery pack
is sealed and waterproof then changes in air-pressure move the
membrane-like case. In special cases these movements combined with
vibration can cause internal contacts to break and to shorten a battery
pack. The suddenly released energy makes smoke coming out of the luggage
tray. That effect already caused several known rescue-landings although
there was no terrorist on board.
Please take care.
Cu Hugo
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