8 ms·

Auto Safety Regulators Seek a Driver Mode to Block Apps

50 points by perseusprime11 10y ago

roflchoppa 10y ago
Serious question, in the event that we don't have fatalities from auto accidents, where will the organ donations come from? Will it be a good push for stem cell technology?
- grzm 10y ago
  Interesting question, though I'd want to know what the breakdown for organ sourcing is before I consider what the impact would be.
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    i would assume that it would be a majority of the donations, i cant think of other ways people die where their organs could still be utilized? (drug OD // old age // etc)
    - grzm 10y ago
      Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised that it's a major source as well. Looks like drug overdose is a significant (and unfortunately increasing) source: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/14/497799446/organ-donations-spike-in-the-wake-of-the-opioid-epidemic http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/14/49779944... Looks like suicide is significant as well, though I'm not sure how to interpret this section of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Suicide Crikey. What a morbid subject. :/
      - roflchoppa 10y ago
        I would think that organs that are harvested from OD victims would not be "good" because of the harm that the drugs can cause the organs? Perhaps its organs that were not effected // deemed usable.
        grzm 10y ago
        From the NPR article: Dr. Jay Fishman, associate director of [Boston's Mass General] transplant center, says an organ from someone who used drugs is not necessarily risky and may even be healthier than other options. "You have to remember that as awful as this outbreak is, these are younger people who are dying, often with needles in their arms, and many of them were first-time drug users," Fishman says. "They weren't all addicts."
- adamtheclayman 10y ago
  Zombie donors already aren't even remotely adequate for our kidney donation needs. We need more living donors to step up... ordinary people like you and me, willing to spend a couple days in the hospital mostly pain-free to give others an average of 12+ years of longevity. Unlike women, who can give birth and gift 76 - 80 years of life at a time (falsely assuming present longevities), living non-zombie kidney donation is the only life-giving medical operation that billions of males are uniquely qualified to undergo to give another person 10+ years of life in one dose at mortality rates that are lower than most women routinely undertake on behalf of their families, their children, and their husbands in their lifetimes with replacement rate pregnancies.
- copperx 10y ago
  We can make organ donation an opt-out checkbox.
  - redial 10y ago
    But the question is when would they donate their organs? (Making the assumption that most organ donations come from people in car accidents).
  - roflchoppa 10y ago
    i dont see why you would not want to be an organ donor, body is just a rental anyway?
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      I think the parents point is that we have seen in some places (Netherlands?) that a dramatic increase in organ donors happened when they switched from opt-in to opt-out.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        In Portugal we have opt-out, while here in Germany it is opt-in, I never understood the decision, exactly because of what you mention.
    - unimpressive 10y ago
      Religious beliefs, cryonics. (But then I repeat myself...)
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
  You answered your own question. By the time we see a serious drop in auto fatalities because of mass adoption of Autonomous vehicles, Id imagine we'll be able to 3D print organs that wont encounter rejection. Alternatively, you could always take a medical holiday to China.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    This has already happened there has been a huge decline in available donor organs due to reduced road fatalities, especially the kind that still leave organs viable for harvesting.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Think of it in reverse. The survivor of the accident that doesn't happen donates their organs to themself. Organ donation is just one means to increase survivorship, but there are other means as well.
- visarga 10y ago
  It's already been that way since safety belts became mandatory - the number of organs for available for transplant plummeted.
- psherman 10y ago
  Perhaps a not so serious answer, but Larry Niven has a number of science fiction stories based on this concept, which is dubbed organlegging [0]. The one that sticks out in my mind is The Jigsaw Man [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man
georgeott 10y ago
What if you are just a passenger in the car? How will they determine this?
- koenigdavidmj 10y ago
  If the phone is connected to a car by Bluetooth or USB, assume it's the driver's. If you get it wrong, it's just a minor inconvenience (unplug if you really need to use those features).
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    Doesn't that just encourage drivers that want to use their phone while driving to not tether their phone to their car's bluetooth?
  - jaxbot 10y ago
    My partner and I will trade off who drives, but mine is always the one on Bluetooth. This would make it super annoying for me to navigate to places as a passenger, and I'd have to use her phone, which then shows the defects in the system.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    This would be a disaster for me. Whenever my wife and I are traveling in the US she is the driver and I am the navigator. My phone will be connected and I have to "translate"/enhance Waze directions for her and take care of the music. So none of that would be possible anymore. Would be the same BS as some cars that won't allow me to pair my phone while my wife is driving. I guess we would just have to use the phone speakers then.
  - adiabatty 10y ago
    You shouldn't have to stop charging your phone to be able to use it in the car, especially when GPS sucks battery something fierce.
- pcl 10y ago
  A good question. From the article, one of the things the guidelines call for is that manufacturers "develop technology to identify when the devices are being used by a driver while driving. That would ensure the limits are placed on drivers and not other vehicle occupants." I bet that if the handset manufacturers were to work with the car manufacturers, they could pretty easily locate the phone to a foot or so with minimal battery impact.
jimminy 10y ago
I was thinking about this the other day. The Apple patent on IR blocking for concert bvenues, would fit this purpose pretty well.
leifg 10y ago
Switch to self driving cars, problem solved.
- jaxbot 10y ago
  This is my stance. Texting (and apps) while driving is a huge issue, but so is road rage, DUIs, forgetting to check the bike lane when turning, loud music that makes it impossible to hear ambulances approaching, massive A pillars in newer cars that save the passengers in a wreck but make it impossible to see pedestrians entering a crosswalk when taking a left, people being dicks and running lights because they're more important than you, and the general fact that humans get distracted and can never focus on all directions at once. I appreciate the regulators trying to solve a major piece of the puzzle, but honestly, if we want to reduce the toll that automobiles are pushing on society, we need to focus on a world where very few humans are driving. Some of that is self driving cars, some of that is better rapid transit infra (and two and two go together).
adamtheclayman 10y ago
About damn time. Distracted driving first broke into public consciousness as a serious determinant of injury and mortality in 02009 / 02010. NHTSA could have demanded this from the '09 Apple / Google / Microsoft smartphone trifecta 6 years ago, and seen it implemented by '11 or '12. I'm rather disappointed that Secretary Foxx and the Administrative and Technical Teams under President Obama did not provision these countermeasures as a national technical safety standard earlier. Cars are so much more dangerous than terrorism... this Times article puts it at 100 souls per day. Put differently, that's at least 10x more fatalities than 9/11, every single year, or over 150x more than Osama bin Laden's hijackers just from 2001 - 2016. Shockingly, just in the lag between the 9/11 Attack and the Land War in Afghanistan, just about as many people were killed by negligent car crashes in the domestic United States than the 2,997 souls lost on 9/11... counting the hijackers. So which is more urgent and important? Getting human drivers off the road and young, healthy, male living donors into donor transplant program recruitment funnels or sending our young, healthy males to fight terrorism? It's a false dichotomy... we can do all three... but the first quantitatively outranks the second by 1.1+ orders of magnitude.
dangero 10y ago
If this did pass I can imagine the number of rooted smart phones would skyrocket. There has never really been a compelling reason to root an iPhone, but I bet for a lot of people this would be it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tajen 10y ago
  Or, as another comment awesomely suggests, we'll have drive-safe modes that apps can support, boosting both the ergonomy (it's annoying on an iPad that the large screen only displays a tiny 24px icon to switch tracks) and the driving safety. It's all because we, app developers, haven't made things great yet, but sure it's a strong incentive for Apple to up their game.
bsder 10y ago
I hope they do this. I would love to laugh while the carriers never sell another phone and everybody else installs Cyanogen. Toyota had to remove a system diagnostic feature that would disable the "can't adjust nav system while driving" misfeature. I can just imagine the fuss if you forced someone under 35 to actually not be able to use their phone for 60 seconds.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  I wish Toyota would release an update for older vehicles. Our Prius V won't let you adjust the navigation destination or even reconnect bluetooth devices while in gear (even with a passenger!). This means that if the bluetooth connection dies, it won't reconnect until you pull over. Huge pain in the butt. Everything this article suggests sounds like a disaster. I'm sure they'll implement it with low range NFC around the driver, but it will still cause massive headaches for other occupants and won't even accomplish what it is meant to (i.e. people willing to break the law now will simply bypass it, and everyone else will be inconvenienced).
  - nihonde 10y ago
    In Japan, dealers install a kill switch for the navi blocker and wink at you when they deliver the car. Everyone drives with live tv on the dash in full view of the driver and fully interactive touch screen navi.
joering2 10y ago
Why bother? Just limit all 55 miles zone to 45. And 45s to 35. I bet statistically it will safe 1.7 life per 10-years. Then keep limiting them to practically walk-speed and we all be fine! /s
tdkl 10y ago
The further worthless nannying continues. We're on the Autobahn to idiocracy.
brian-armstrong 10y ago
The solution to this is simple: one way or another, except for people whose job it is to drive, we should stop having people drive cars, whether that means public transit, more bike lanes, or self-driving cars or something else. I do think it's possible to approximately locate a driver's phone, though it will likely work relatively imperfectly. But then consider that driving drunk is also a huge hazard, and yet most people don't have breathalyzers required to start their cars (and yes, this technology does already exist)
- topbanana 10y ago
  It'll take some time to get to that point. Is the proposed driving mode a good stop-gap? I think it could well be.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    I don't think it's a good stop-gap for me. I wan't to be able to use my own gps app (OSMand), not retarded Google Maps that has less features than bottomfeeeder gps unit you buy at wallmart But I can concede that people are sure as fuck going to use facebook on those screens if there was a way to do so -.-
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Man, I'm so tired of the whole self-driving meme It's years off in most of the world, while more and more sophisticated infotaiment screens that can distract the drivers are ALREADY on the market
  - mikestew 10y ago
    No shit. Every "problems with driving and cars" thread inevitably has a half dozen people who are way too pleased with themselves saying "won't be a problem in just a few years with self-driving cars!" It's almost the dictionary definition of "hand-wave away". BTW, and I hate to digress, but how's that "year of the Linux desktop" going twenty years later? I've probably got twenty, thirty years at best left before I depart this mortal coil. When my body reaches room temperature, I expect at best self-driving cars will be an expensive novelty. In the meantime, can we go on with solving today's problems with today's, or near-future technologies and quit hand-waving with vaporware?
cellularmitosis 10y ago
I feel like something which is missing from this entire conversation is the idea of building user interfaces which are easier to use while driving. It feels like we are stuck in an era when abstinence was the only teen pregnancy solution which was politically safe to discuss. A simple example would be a music player where the UI is a full screen block of solid color which recognizes swipe guestures to control playback. There's no reason to look at the phone because there's nothing to look at. A bit more controversial would be Apple automatically dialing up the accessibility font size boost if the phone is moving faster than 10 mph. We may not be able to prevent people from using their phones while driving, but we can reduce the amount of time required to interact with their phone's UI by using easier-to-acquire font sizes and putting less text on the screen.
- slimsag 10y ago
  Is the issue really with how people interface with applications, or rather that interacting with applications takes focus away from the road? A person can be looking at the road with their eyes but not focusing on it (being prepared to respond) at the same time.
- rtpg 10y ago
  What makes you think that it's possible for people to drive and use their phone at the same time at all? Driver distraction is the number one cause of accidents, and when you're driving at 60 mph, even looking away for a second is enough to cause an accident. Would you be comfortable with a bus driver ever using their phone on the job while driving? Your taxi driver?
- chei0iaV 10y ago
  > font size boost if the phone is moving faster than 10 mph I'm sure people using public transit would be absolutely thrilled!
btbuildem 10y ago
> Apple iPhones and other hand-held devices have long had an airplane mode that shuts off wireless communications to prevent interference with the vast electronics systems that control modern aircraft. This is such hogwash -- if there was the remotest possibility of phones etc interfering with onboard instruments of an aircraft, you can bet they'd strip all your electronics off your person at security and stash them in a lead-lined bin in the cargo hold for the journey. It's amazing people just believe what they're told..
dmode 10y ago
The Android Auto app on Android smartphones already does this. It has still have some ways to go with other app developers participating, but that could be a model for future.

Serious question, in the event that we don't have fatalities from auto accidents, where will the organ donations come from? Will it be a good push for stem cell technology?

grzm 10y ago
Interesting question, though I'd want to know what the breakdown for organ sourcing is before I consider what the impact would be.
- roflchoppa 10y ago
  i would assume that it would be a majority of the donations, i cant think of other ways people die where their organs could still be utilized? (drug OD // old age // etc)
  - grzm 10y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised that it's a major source as well. Looks like drug overdose is a significant (and unfortunately increasing) source: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/14/497799446/organ-donations-spike-in-the-wake-of-the-opioid-epidemic http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/10/14/49779944... Looks like suicide is significant as well, though I'm not sure how to interpret this section of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Suicide Crikey. What a morbid subject. :/
    - roflchoppa 10y ago
      I would think that organs that are harvested from OD victims would not be "good" because of the harm that the drugs can cause the organs? Perhaps its organs that were not effected // deemed usable.
      - grzm 10y ago
        From the NPR article: Dr. Jay Fishman, associate director of [Boston's Mass General] transplant center, says an organ from someone who used drugs is not necessarily risky and may even be healthier than other options. "You have to remember that as awful as this outbreak is, these are younger people who are dying, often with needles in their arms, and many of them were first-time drug users," Fishman says. "They weren't all addicts."
adamtheclayman 10y ago
Zombie donors already aren't even remotely adequate for our kidney donation needs. We need more living donors to step up... ordinary people like you and me, willing to spend a couple days in the hospital mostly pain-free to give others an average of 12+ years of longevity. Unlike women, who can give birth and gift 76 - 80 years of life at a time (falsely assuming present longevities), living non-zombie kidney donation is the only life-giving medical operation that billions of males are uniquely qualified to undergo to give another person 10+ years of life in one dose at mortality rates that are lower than most women routinely undertake on behalf of their families, their children, and their husbands in their lifetimes with replacement rate pregnancies.
copperx 10y ago
We can make organ donation an opt-out checkbox.
- redial 10y ago
  But the question is when would they donate their organs? (Making the assumption that most organ donations come from people in car accidents).
- roflchoppa 10y ago
  i dont see why you would not want to be an organ donor, body is just a rental anyway?
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I think the parents point is that we have seen in some places (Netherlands?) that a dramatic increase in organ donors happened when they switched from opt-in to opt-out.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      In Portugal we have opt-out, while here in Germany it is opt-in, I never understood the decision, exactly because of what you mention.
  - unimpressive 10y ago
    Religious beliefs, cryonics. (But then I repeat myself...)
FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
You answered your own question. By the time we see a serious drop in auto fatalities because of mass adoption of Autonomous vehicles, Id imagine we'll be able to 3D print organs that wont encounter rejection. Alternatively, you could always take a medical holiday to China.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  This has already happened there has been a huge decline in available donor organs due to reduced road fatalities, especially the kind that still leave organs viable for harvesting.
tedunangst 10y ago
Think of it in reverse. The survivor of the accident that doesn't happen donates their organs to themself. Organ donation is just one means to increase survivorship, but there are other means as well.
visarga 10y ago
It's already been that way since safety belts became mandatory - the number of organs for available for transplant plummeted.
psherman 10y ago
Perhaps a not so serious answer, but Larry Niven has a number of science fiction stories based on this concept, which is dubbed organlegging [0]. The one that sticks out in my mind is The Jigsaw Man [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organlegging [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jigsaw_Man

georgeott 10y ago

What if you are just a passenger in the car? How will they determine this?

koenigdavidmj 10y ago
If the phone is connected to a car by Bluetooth or USB, assume it's the driver's. If you get it wrong, it's just a minor inconvenience (unplug if you really need to use those features).
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Doesn't that just encourage drivers that want to use their phone while driving to not tether their phone to their car's bluetooth?
- jaxbot 10y ago
  My partner and I will trade off who drives, but mine is always the one on Bluetooth. This would make it super annoying for me to navigate to places as a passenger, and I'd have to use her phone, which then shows the defects in the system.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  This would be a disaster for me. Whenever my wife and I are traveling in the US she is the driver and I am the navigator. My phone will be connected and I have to "translate"/enhance Waze directions for her and take care of the music. So none of that would be possible anymore. Would be the same BS as some cars that won't allow me to pair my phone while my wife is driving. I guess we would just have to use the phone speakers then.
- adiabatty 10y ago
  You shouldn't have to stop charging your phone to be able to use it in the car, especially when GPS sucks battery something fierce.
pcl 10y ago
A good question. From the article, one of the things the guidelines call for is that manufacturers "develop technology to identify when the devices are being used by a driver while driving. That would ensure the limits are placed on drivers and not other vehicle occupants." I bet that if the handset manufacturers were to work with the car manufacturers, they could pretty easily locate the phone to a foot or so with minimal battery impact.

jimminy 10y ago

I was thinking about this the other day. The Apple patent on IR blocking for concert bvenues, would fit this purpose pretty well.

leifg 10y ago

Switch to self driving cars, problem solved.

jaxbot 10y ago
This is my stance. Texting (and apps) while driving is a huge issue, but so is road rage, DUIs, forgetting to check the bike lane when turning, loud music that makes it impossible to hear ambulances approaching, massive A pillars in newer cars that save the passengers in a wreck but make it impossible to see pedestrians entering a crosswalk when taking a left, people being dicks and running lights because they're more important than you, and the general fact that humans get distracted and can never focus on all directions at once. I appreciate the regulators trying to solve a major piece of the puzzle, but honestly, if we want to reduce the toll that automobiles are pushing on society, we need to focus on a world where very few humans are driving. Some of that is self driving cars, some of that is better rapid transit infra (and two and two go together).

adamtheclayman 10y ago

About damn time. Distracted driving first broke into public consciousness as a serious determinant of injury and mortality in 02009 / 02010. NHTSA could have demanded this from the '09 Apple / Google / Microsoft smartphone trifecta 6 years ago, and seen it implemented by '11 or '12. I'm rather disappointed that Secretary Foxx and the Administrative and Technical Teams under President Obama did not provision these countermeasures as a national technical safety standard earlier. Cars are so much more dangerous than terrorism... this Times article puts it at 100 souls per day. Put differently, that's at least 10x more fatalities than 9/11, every single year, or over 150x more than Osama bin Laden's hijackers just from 2001 - 2016. Shockingly, just in the lag between the 9/11 Attack and the Land War in Afghanistan, just about as many people were killed by negligent car crashes in the domestic United States than the 2,997 souls lost on 9/11... counting the hijackers. So which is more urgent and important? Getting human drivers off the road and young, healthy, male living donors into donor transplant program recruitment funnels or sending our young, healthy males to fight terrorism? It's a false dichotomy... we can do all three... but the first quantitatively outranks the second by 1.1+ orders of magnitude.

dangero 10y ago

If this did pass I can imagine the number of rooted smart phones would skyrocket. There has never really been a compelling reason to root an iPhone, but I bet for a lot of people this would be it.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tajen 10y ago
Or, as another comment awesomely suggests, we'll have drive-safe modes that apps can support, boosting both the ergonomy (it's annoying on an iPad that the large screen only displays a tiny 24px icon to switch tracks) and the driving safety. It's all because we, app developers, haven't made things great yet, but sure it's a strong incentive for Apple to up their game.

bsder 10y ago

I hope they do this. I would love to laugh while the carriers never sell another phone and everybody else installs Cyanogen. Toyota had to remove a system diagnostic feature that would disable the "can't adjust nav system while driving" misfeature. I can just imagine the fuss if you forced someone under 35 to actually not be able to use their phone for 60 seconds.

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
I wish Toyota would release an update for older vehicles. Our Prius V won't let you adjust the navigation destination or even reconnect bluetooth devices while in gear (even with a passenger!). This means that if the bluetooth connection dies, it won't reconnect until you pull over. Huge pain in the butt. Everything this article suggests sounds like a disaster. I'm sure they'll implement it with low range NFC around the driver, but it will still cause massive headaches for other occupants and won't even accomplish what it is meant to (i.e. people willing to break the law now will simply bypass it, and everyone else will be inconvenienced).
- nihonde 10y ago
  In Japan, dealers install a kill switch for the navi blocker and wink at you when they deliver the car. Everyone drives with live tv on the dash in full view of the driver and fully interactive touch screen navi.

joering2 10y ago

Why bother? Just limit all 55 miles zone to 45. And 45s to 35. I bet statistically it will safe 1.7 life per 10-years. Then keep limiting them to practically walk-speed and we all be fine! /s

tdkl 10y ago

The further worthless nannying continues. We're on the Autobahn to idiocracy.

brian-armstrong 10y ago

The solution to this is simple: one way or another, except for people whose job it is to drive, we should stop having people drive cars, whether that means public transit, more bike lanes, or self-driving cars or something else. I do think it's possible to approximately locate a driver's phone, though it will likely work relatively imperfectly. But then consider that driving drunk is also a huge hazard, and yet most people don't have breathalyzers required to start their cars (and yes, this technology does already exist)

topbanana 10y ago
It'll take some time to get to that point. Is the proposed driving mode a good stop-gap? I think it could well be.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  I don't think it's a good stop-gap for me. I wan't to be able to use my own gps app (OSMand), not retarded Google Maps that has less features than bottomfeeeder gps unit you buy at wallmart But I can concede that people are sure as fuck going to use facebook on those screens if there was a way to do so -.-
emp_zealoth 10y ago
Man, I'm so tired of the whole self-driving meme It's years off in most of the world, while more and more sophisticated infotaiment screens that can distract the drivers are ALREADY on the market
- mikestew 10y ago
  No shit. Every "problems with driving and cars" thread inevitably has a half dozen people who are way too pleased with themselves saying "won't be a problem in just a few years with self-driving cars!" It's almost the dictionary definition of "hand-wave away". BTW, and I hate to digress, but how's that "year of the Linux desktop" going twenty years later? I've probably got twenty, thirty years at best left before I depart this mortal coil. When my body reaches room temperature, I expect at best self-driving cars will be an expensive novelty. In the meantime, can we go on with solving today's problems with today's, or near-future technologies and quit hand-waving with vaporware?

cellularmitosis 10y ago

I feel like something which is missing from this entire conversation is the idea of building user interfaces which are easier to use while driving. It feels like we are stuck in an era when abstinence was the only teen pregnancy solution which was politically safe to discuss. A simple example would be a music player where the UI is a full screen block of solid color which recognizes swipe guestures to control playback. There's no reason to look at the phone because there's nothing to look at. A bit more controversial would be Apple automatically dialing up the accessibility font size boost if the phone is moving faster than 10 mph. We may not be able to prevent people from using their phones while driving, but we can reduce the amount of time required to interact with their phone's UI by using easier-to-acquire font sizes and putting less text on the screen.

slimsag 10y ago
Is the issue really with how people interface with applications, or rather that interacting with applications takes focus away from the road? A person can be looking at the road with their eyes but not focusing on it (being prepared to respond) at the same time.
rtpg 10y ago
What makes you think that it's possible for people to drive and use their phone at the same time at all? Driver distraction is the number one cause of accidents, and when you're driving at 60 mph, even looking away for a second is enough to cause an accident. Would you be comfortable with a bus driver ever using their phone on the job while driving? Your taxi driver?
chei0iaV 10y ago
> font size boost if the phone is moving faster than 10 mph I'm sure people using public transit would be absolutely thrilled!

btbuildem 10y ago

> Apple iPhones and other hand-held devices have long had an airplane mode that shuts off wireless communications to prevent interference with the vast electronics systems that control modern aircraft. This is such hogwash -- if there was the remotest possibility of phones etc interfering with onboard instruments of an aircraft, you can bet they'd strip all your electronics off your person at security and stash them in a lead-lined bin in the cargo hold for the journey. It's amazing people just believe what they're told..

dmode 10y ago

The Android Auto app on Android smartphones already does this. It has still have some ways to go with other app developers participating, but that could be a model for future.