Malaysian Airlines 777 with 239 Aboard Missing

Back in '02, Sprint announced that they were going to be spending $20 billion to upgrade their network to 3G, so even doubling that $510 million cost, would be chicken feed compared to what's being spent on cellphone networks in just the US.

Satphone maker Iridium is going to be spending roughly $500 million to cover the launch cost for its next generation satellites, which means that they'll be putting some 70 birds in orbit.

We actually are willing to lay out huge amounts of dollars for such things when we see fit. Cruise ships charge an exorbitant fee for shitty internet access while at sea, just boosting the connection speeds to that of 3G while charging the same assrapingly high fees would enable the system to pay for itself fairly quickly. (Nobody on a cruise is willing to pay a high price for dial up speeds, but get the speeds at ISDN levels or higher, and they'll pay the $20 per MB fee to check their email at least once.)

Why would you do that?

If you know they are on board and you know where they are going, in this case China, you simply ask the Chinese to grab them.

The Chinese don't like terrorists either. Especially ones with stolen passports and ones landing in China which means they may be causing trouble in China.

Tangentially related, the ADS-B data that airliners send out can be picked up with a normal HDTV antenna connected to your PC.

http://www.flightradar24.com/hardware

I know it looks terrible, but as unlikely as it sounds, maybe there are still survivors. I certainly hope so. I hope everyone gets out of this whole thing alive.

Some news reports are saying the plane may have been hijacked. It either crashed or landed somewhere. Let's hope it's the latter.

Now the investigation reveals (spoiler alert) that airport security dropped the ball by letting the bad guys slip onto the bird.
I would investigate any sudden bank deposits from the security workers too.
Stolen passports with pictures not matching the passengers would be one clue to something being askew.
If their airport security are as sleazy, incompetent, corrupt and thieving as America's are, this is no big shock.

It fails the most basic reasoning. How is it done? Bomb on board? Scrambling a military jet? Cruise missile? UAV? What sort of operator is going to "pull the trigger" on killing a planeload of innocents to get a couple people? Why not just wait for the plane to land and have agents waiting at the jetway to snatch them? D.B. Cooper notwithstanding, no one is getting off a commercial jet until it lands.

Is this the thread where Tucker steadfastly defends the latest photoshopped fan-made movie poster he's found on the Internet? Or the one where he steadfastly defends his belief in the future of broadband before ultimately threatening to ban anyone who disagrees with him? Because either one of those is
But back on topic,

Well, I'm more of a generalist than a specialist, but communication technology is my background so I'll weigh in with my reasoning:

Your cell phone can function as a GPS receiver. What happens then is that you've got a constellation of GPS satellites, all broadcasting a UHF signal. Your phone picks up at least 3 of those signals from space to triangulate your location. Functioning as a receiver eats up a butt-ton of power. Well, maybe not a butt-ton, but a lot. Enough that your battery runs down measurably faster if you're using the GPS. And enough that people like myself don't use the GPS in order to save power.

But can you imagine the power it would take your phone to transmit a signal to a satellite in space (as opposed to a cell tower a couple miles away)? That is a butt-ton. In fact I've worked with satellite phones. They are about the size of the old Motorola "brick," partly because of the size of battery and size of antenna they need. And that is all they do. Talk via satellite instead of via cell tower. No Internet, no Angry Birds, no Google Maps.

I suppose you could have programming in cell phones so that they pulled their location from GPS and then transmitted that location via cell tower, but again, that raised the particular lack of cell towers over the China Sea. Maybe they could develop a cell phone that would piggyback on the aircraft's communication system, but I shudder to think the secondary effects that could have--as well as the ways terrorists could exploit them.

Aren't Malaysian airports on the US list of airports that do not meet security US security standards?

I don't advocate US security theater, but matching ID's would seem prudent (assuming the passports weren't modified).

Reports are coming out now that they are finding plane parts floating in the ocean. Time will tell if this wreckage actually belongs to the plane.

Okay.......last comments on the subject before the earth beneath my feet opens up and whisks me into the pit of (a well deserved) Hell for all eternity.

"Seven seven seven falling out of the sky........"

I'm busy, but feel free to move all the derp to it's own thread. Use the same thread title just put [derp version] at the end.

Pardon the hijack, but it looks like some debris has been found.

Done.

All, please take your DERP to the thread so-marked. Keep posts here on the thread topic (or in reasonable proximity thereto).

Wow! Maybe I'm not as dumb as I look. I'm not the only one who said "Euro names, Asian faces" but breaking it down culturally, many Asians have "tunnel vision" meaning they don't think outside the box. They just don't have the street smarts/horse sense of westerners, specifically Americans.

Malaysia's state news agency quoted Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi as saying the two passengers using the stolen European passports were of Asian appearance, and criticizing border officials who let them through.

"I am still perturbed. Can't these immigration officials think? Italian and Austrian but with Asian faces," he was quoted as saying late on Sunday.

(Additional reporting

Well the passports were stolen doesn't mean that the passenger showed up and showed a passport with a picture of some other guy on the passport. I'm sure they switched out the pictures or had someone make totally new passports using the stolen information.

So anyone would just and say, "that's my name"

I would say a bomb either in a forward first class bathroom (if carry on) or in the forward cargo hold near the avionics bay.

Not enough to blow the airliner out of the sky, but enough to puncture the hull and cause rapid depressurization.

The crew turns the plane back (as radar indicates) and try to head into a dive to get to a higher pressure altitude. But because of depressurization is too rapid they are unable to mask up (or key controls being severed) they nose over into a dive and go into the ocean almost vertically. Aircraft, passengers and crew are pretty much pulverized on impact and at night, most debris sinks before day break.

of course that is just speculation.

It's plausible enough. I'm curious as to what we'll find in the next several days.

So the Red Room is no longer the Red Room.

We should rename it.

Don't get me wrong I don't like threads that get stupid but you all playing what post is "derp" and what isn't "derp" and then threatening posters to keep on topic is going to cause quite a bit of problems down the road.

I suggest we call the Red Room by it's new name: The Neutral Zone

And I have no intention of posting in a "derp" thread to satisfy some mods view of how a thread should run its course and how posters shall post in said thread.

From Mr. Ginger: "No one has been warned, much less banned. No post has been deleted, much less a thread. All this has been done before, we are not TK."

Who said anyone got warned or banned?

Though I'm sure the warnings are around the corner for those who won't comply with posting in the Red Room like the good little posters you think we should be.

As long as it's in the Red Room I'll post as I please.

You and what now appears to be the biggest ass-kisser on the board, Paladin, are not going to tell me what posts of mine are on topic and what are derp. You're not going to tell me where I can write in the Red Room.

Exactly.

I hate to agree with Zombie, but I think there has been a lot of heavy handed mod editing of threads lately.

BREAKING: Flight 777 has been located. More details to come...

There was a line in that episode that has since been made incorrect - the pilot notes that they're clearly flying over New York because he could make out the shapes of Manhattan and Long Island. Plate tectonic theory wasn't widely known at the time the episode was written.

After reading through this thread, I'm not seeing where the "derp" allegedly started. I do see where idiot Garamet tried to troll by insinuating that an intelligence agency shot the plane down to kill any terrorists aboard. When Dayton called her on it, she retreated and refused to back her statement up.

So now I'll read the "derp" thread and try to figureout what got Paladin's ppanties in a wad.

Wow... you're a total dumbass, eh Flash? Garamet successfully made fun of Dayton's totally unfounded speculation, with a bit of unfounded, but totally opposite, speculation of her own, thereby giving him a taste of his own medicine. Her only mistake was in believing him to be smart enough to grasp the point. He wasn't. And neither, apparently, are you.

No, dumbfuck. Read the thread before wasting our time with your stupidity. Garamet's statement was in response to Gul making the perfectly reasonable speculation that passengers traveling under stolen passports might indicate a terrorist attack. Maggie then jumped in with her idiocy.

I posited a bit of speculation, and it sent the blinkered literal-minded into hysterics.

It's the kind of spitballing done in wargames scenarios. It's the kind of spitballing writers do all the time. It's called What-if? Matter of fact, precisely that scenario was featured in an episode of MI-5 called "The Courier."

Flashy and Dayton (talk about the Odd Couple!) are the type that follow writers around asking "So, um, like, where do you get your ideas?" Ike Asimov (Harlan claims he said it first, but who knows?) always dismissed them with "Schenectady."

As more and more evidence is emerging in the Real Life case, it's beginning to look like a suicide attack.

Why Flashy and Dayton think there's some potential Real Life danger in running other speculative scenarios is anyone's guess.

They are now investigating more problem passports.

Also I've read that five people didn't get on the flight but that their luggage was pulled.

Shut up Rick. You were asked to back up your speculation and you refused to do so. End of story.

How is garamet supposed to shut up Rick? I don't think she knows where he lives or anything.