Depending on where you're at I'm not sure I'd want to put mine or my kid's name on anything that could be used to make us a target. At pride last year we spent some time talking to pflag and I ultimately decided not to give them our information, but took a card and flyer.
Depending on where you're at defending your kid from the state is now something that must be part of your calculations. If you can afford it, I recommend moving to as safe of a state as you can. Because feeling like your government is targeting you is painful, exhausting, and incredibly lonely.
Generally speaking I do things myself because it's cheaper, in that it lets me allocate cash in higher quality versions of things than I would otherwise be able to afford. I grew up pretty poor and that was how my family did things. Car breaks, that's why you buy a Chilton's. Appliance isn't working? You can always order the part for a tenth of what it costs to have the appliance guy tell you what's wrong. AC quit working? Those capacitors are super easy to replace and only cost $7.
Now I could pay people to do more things for me, but it's only under certain circumstances.
Sometimes it just boils down to something my Dad told me underneath a car (or a house maybe) like 30 years ago: "Nobody is gonna care about your shit more than you do."
It's not the iPads themselves, it's the addition of Bluetooth and/or wifi to support them. I agree that they can alleviate a lot in terms of paperwork reduction etc. My issue is the additional exposed surface.
It doesn't, that's just a very common reaction to these types of articles. I recall having some very intense discussions around stuff like iPads in cockpits. I'm on the "not a fan" side, but I'm also not making avionics software anymore either.
Certification is expensive. But updated dbs are pretty huge and seem to only get bigger over time. Stuff like radio firmware tends to be in the hundreds of KBs though, so for that it really wouldn't be a big deal either way.
These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.
You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.
The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that's what you want.
I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it's one of the few things Boeing shouldn't be mocked for right now.
Like, we know toxins concentrate in water creatures. That's why you'll see way more warnings about fish you harvest on any DNR page than you will deer.
I appreciate HW engineers and techs. I'm not afraid of datasheets, circuit diagrams, or a mso and they're always patient enough to explain things to me so I can make the rocks behave. Or at least tell me how to go from diagram to board lol.
Depending on where you're at I'm not sure I'd want to put mine or my kid's name on anything that could be used to make us a target. At pride last year we spent some time talking to pflag and I ultimately decided not to give them our information, but took a card and flyer.
https://www.aclu.org/cases/pflag-v-office-of-the-attorney-general-of-texas
Depending on where you're at defending your kid from the state is now something that must be part of your calculations. If you can afford it, I recommend moving to as safe of a state as you can. Because feeling like your government is targeting you is painful, exhausting, and incredibly lonely.