Instapundit and others are making fun of TSA people who didn’t know what a Macbook Air was.
This only tells me that neither Professor Reynolds nor the others he links understand the world of non-geekdom, which the last time I checked is only about 99% of the population. So for the 1% who have trouble getting this: A) Most people don’t have laptops, and B) of those who do, it’s unlikely even 5% of them own Macbooks. Heck, most Mac owners probably haven’t seen the Macbook Air yet.
Apple makes totally sweet hardware, and I’m an admirer of the company and its products. But mocking airport security personnel for not recognizing the very latest in cutting-edge laptops from Apple? Come on people. That’s just stupid.
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If I were a suspicious man, I’d suspect this story of being viral marketing planted by Apple
In other Macbook Air news, Steven Levy of Newsweek thinks he accidentally threw his review unit away with his newspaper.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/120052
I think the TSA agent did a good thing. But then again, I feel kind of sorry for those folks in general. Talk about a crappy, no-win job.
And there’s nothing wrong with erring on the side of caution. Too bad the dude missed his flight, but if he didn’t have at least 15-20 minutes of buffer built into his travel plans, shame on him.
I had something similar happen to me last year. My notebook got flagged by the x-ray operator, and the “supervisor†or whatever came up to check it out. My problem was that I didn’t have a battery in it. I had taken it out a few weeks before because it crapped out and I needed to order a new one. When I discovered my notebook worked without a battery, I never put it back in.
I forgot about that when I hit the road. I guess it showed up as a big empty space on the x-ray machine, and the operator didn’t like what he saw. The senior guy looked at the x-ray, grabbed my notebook, popped open compartment, saw that it was empty, put it back together, and sent me on my way. Seemed perfectly understandable to me.
On the other hand stereotypes will byte ya. I once had a TSA officer look at one of my C# books and give me a long discourse on why he used only Java and Perl on his projects. As a guy who paid for college by working as a securityguard, I can tell you that I was far from alone. High tech alarm systems demand tech skills.
I think the laughter is centered on this very obvious example of security theater vs. real security. We expect them to know the difference between a laptop and a bomb that looks like a laptop when they don’t even know what a laptop looks like.
I carry presentation equipment with me. The odds that a guy who’s chosen vocation is searching bags at the airport knowing the difference between a VX-88 VGA Matrix Switcher (routes computer video signals) and a CRM-114 Plane Destroyer (destroys planes) is on a very low order of probability.
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I think this time, the TSA dude gets to hold the bag.
I’ve been traveling throughout the US and abroad for the last couple of years with a sub-compact that has no optical drive, no floppy drive for that matter. No security guard at any airport has yet to question the device. If anything, it gets confused with a DVD player.
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Nothing to laugh about; shouldn’t they be trained to know these products though?
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I don’t blame the agents themselves. Most just follow the rules they’re given, and apparently The Rules say that laptop-shaped objects should have hard drives and/or optical drives. Reasonable, but wrong. Someone just needs to update the rules (quickly) to match reality.
Opinion on Slashdot actually seems fairly well split on this issue. Surprising, since they generally rank the TSA slightly below Windows users on their scale of self-superiority. They’ve been disconcertingly reasonable over there lately; I think it’s some kind of a trick.
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The odds that a guy who’s chosen vocation is searching bags at the airport knowing the difference between a VX-88 VGA Matrix Switcher (routes computer video signals) and a CRM-114 Plane Destroyer (destroys planes) is on a very low order of probability.
I personally know attorneys, and a CEO of a large company who would have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re speaking Martian to me, and I actually have a MacBook (not the Air though–yet). It’s not just bag searchers that would have a problem with this.
On the other hand, like the others here, I’ve traveled all over with a backpack full of stuff like spotting scopes, dvd players, GPS units, and rechargers for everything, and the only thing I was ever detained for was a .38 special cartridge they found in my purse. That got me a warning letter from the TSA, but that’s all. My dad told me: “thank goodness this is Texas. In New York they would have locked you up”.
That’s my point, Stace. They aren’t training them to be EO experts, so they really don’t know what a bomb is. They aren’t trained to take over planes, so they really don’t know what a hijacking weapon is. The best they can do is deal with rules given to them by a bureaucrat with the same limitations. That isn’t security — it is theater.
More importantly, ask an explosives expert how futile the attempt is even for an expert. (I’m wouldn’t be surprised if Joe shirked the expert title, but the ATF sees fit to “allow” him to make, store and deploy explosives, and if a government bureaucrat allows it, it must be true!)
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As every “24″ watcher knows, if it doesn’t have a flashing red LED, it’s not a bomb.
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This post only tells me that Dean is out of touch with the majority of people who are not really anal (last time I guessed itw as 99% of the population) and feel that they can indeed point out others foolishness at will. It is fun, not stupid.
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