Delta Air Lines Sued Over Alleged E-mail Hacking 152
alphadogg writes "Delta Air Lines is being sued for allegedly hacking the e-mail account of a passenger rights advocate supporting legislation that would allow access to food, water and toilets during long delays on the tarmac. Kathleen Hanni, executive director of Flyersrights.org, alleges Delta obtained sensitive e-mails and files and used the material in an attempt to derail the 'Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights of 2009,' of which four versions are pending before Congress. The suit was filed on Tuesday in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas and seeks a minimum of $11 million in damages. Flyersrights.org, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007, had been investigating surface delays in air travel."
Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
Flyersrights.org, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007, had been investigating surface delays in air travel. According to the suit, Hanni exchanged information with Frederick J. Foreman, who worked for Metron Aviation, which was hired by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to study surface delays. The suit says Foreman provided information to Hanni with permission from Metron, including a report that fingered Delta as having excessive surface delays. Metron is also named in the suit.
During the correspondence, AOL informed Hanni that her e-mails, spreadsheets and lists of donors were being redirected to an unknown destination. Also, files on Hanni's computer became corrupted, the suit says. The hacking began in 2008 and continued through this year.
This does not constitute "hacking" (or even cracking, as it should be termed). Unless I've missed something here, the actual allegation is that information was improperly disclosed, but not that an email account was broken into.
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Somehow the redirection got added there and files became corrupted. Since he's also specifically suing Delta Air Lines, it surely sounds like hacking took place.
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, the odds are extremely good that nobody on Slashdot actually knows the full story, but the "evidence" as presented is absurdly weak for a hacking accusation.
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
Not that weak really...
From the article:
Gaughan (Delta) asked Foreman what information he had shared with Hanni, and Foreman said he sent Hanni information that was already public, according to the affidavit.
Foreman said in the affidavit that Gaughan showed him what appeared to be "hacked and stolen e-mail communications" since the material involved the private e-mail accounts of both himself and Hanni. The e-mails also included correspondence between Foreman and Gary Stoller of USA Today and Susan Stellin, a freelance reporter. Foreman was fired on Sept. 25, according to the affidavit.
Private email account correspondence in the hands of a Delta manager with no legal access to the account is not weak evidence. To be corroborated of course like all other claims, but it's not a weak claim if it can be proven. There have been more "hacking" cases like this lately that blur the term to mean "unauthorized" access more than gaining computer access by advanced technological means.
To change the forwarding on an internal company server, sure, fine. But to do it on outside accounts that you do not own, not so fine.
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:4, Informative)
What part of PRIVATE EMAIL accounts do you not get?
As an AC posted here previously:
Here's another source:
http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/consumer-activist-kate-hanni-a.html [dallasnews.com]
Mr. Gaughan proceeded to show me on his computer monitor what appeared to be hacked and stolen email communications within the last six (6) months or more between Kate Hanni and me, me and Gary Stoller of USA Today, me and Susan Stellin, a freelance reporter, and Kate Hanni and a number of people concerning the Passenger Bill of Rights, excessive surface delays, and other private communications. It was clear that they had email transactions from both of my private email accounts: Hotmail (eckmaster12@msn.com) and Yahoo (eckmaster@mmi-gov.com). It was also clear that these emails were from Kate Hanni's private and personal email account (katcrew4@aol.com), as well as from Gary Stoller's (gstoller@usatoday.com) private USA Today account, and Susan Stellin's (stellin@earthlink.net) private and personal email account. There were no emails communications from Metron Aviation's email system only communications from information that I gave her as fuel for getting the Passenger Bill of Rights passed in Congress. He said that Delta Airlines sent this information to them.
Clear enough?
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Then they would have keylogger records, not email to present him as evidence. They would not be able to view recieved emails, just typed ones. And if that's the case he probably copied and pasted the bulk of the info rather than type it out. Most keylogging software doesn't capture that.
Or they used the keylogging to gain accoount passwords, which is very near theft. What if they see online banking passwords too?
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Good way to end up on some remote planet with a Gorn.
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What part of PRIVATE EMAIL accounts do you not get?
You know that slashdot is going downhill when we have users on here who have never heard of a packet sniffer.
Clear enough?
Yep, it's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Tell ya what, let's bet: $100 on the case being thrown out of court or dropped before going to trial. I can pretty much guarantee that it's being brought by the wrong plaintiff, against the wrong defendant, without a shred of evidence. If you have a paypal account, it should be easy to transfer the winnings at the conclusion of the ca
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outright mass file deletion would be more suspect in my book
...probably why they went with file corruption. Duh!~ ;)
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:4, Informative)
From the article,
1. *someone* was apparently hacking into Hanni's account.
2. Foreman works for Metron.
3. Foreman exchanges emails with Hanni.
4. Senior VP of Metron calls Foreman into office and shows apparent emails of Hanni and Foreman.
5. Hanni accuses Delta/Metron of being the hackers from point 1?
Kind of a leap to jump from point 4 to point 5. Metron's email policies may give up any reasonable privacy if Foreman used a Metron email account. Then again, the article is a bit light on details.
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You missed a big point in 4 - Foreman believed something nefarious was going on, because among the emails shown to him by the Metron SVP were emails from and to Hanni from parties other than Foreman/Metron, as in:
"How did Metron come to be in possession of email correspondence between Hanni and other people?" Foreman, we get - he could have been using his work a
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You missed a big point in 4 - Foreman believed something nefarious was going on, because among the emails shown to him by the Metron SVP were emails from and to Hanni from parties other than Foreman/Metron, as in:
No, they were e-mails to Foreman from parties other than Hanni. Big difference.
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You make huge leaps in judgement in Lawsuits so you can justify Discovery to find out if your allegations are true. She will use the suit to get subpoenas to use against ISP's so if possible she can track the origin of the intrusion and other subpoenas so she can read emails exchanged by Delta and Memron to see if there was a conspiracy. Depending on the servers used the logs may indicate where the hacking came from. If it can be traced to a Delta or Metron IP address she's going to win a LOT of money, if n
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So you allege that the someone in step one sent the mails to the Senior VP of Metron just for the hell of it? In general, when you want to know who committed a crime, you look first at whoever benefited from it. Sometimes that doesn't pan out (and then you should look at who benefits if the obvious suspect is prosecuted), but the vast majority of the time it proves out.
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
Foreman said in the affidavit that Gaughan showed him what appeared to be "hacked and stolen e-mail communications" since the material involved the private e-mail accounts of both himself and Hanni.
Emphasis Added.
This isn't a case of the CEO having access to Foreman's company email account, this was his personal account where he was (apparently) sharing more information that the company wanted him to. He was subsequently fired because of those disclosures. Again, disclosures made through a private, non-company owned channel which the company somehow (presumably illegally) had access to.
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Or the company simply was watching everything he was doing online and keylogged him or logged his internet traffic and thus never needed access to his private inbox.
Not sure how [il]legal THAT would be, though the computer is a company resource and presumably the employee's contract would inform him of the monitoring being done while he is using his computer there.
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Or the company simply was watching everything he was doing online and keylogged him or logged his internet traffic and thus never needed access to his private inbox.
I'm pretty sure most people would call a Man-In-The-Middle attack 'hacking' or 'cracking', depending on pedanticism*.
Not sure how [il]legal THAT would be, though the computer is a company resource and presumably the employee's contract would inform him of the monitoring being done while he is using his computer there.
Yes, there is a good chance that this guy's contract had some disclaimer about company property being monitored - maybe moral, maybe not, but you'd have to be pretty dumb to use a work computer, at work, to conspire against the company you work for, justified or not.
*Yes, that is how it should be written, look it up.
OK, so it isn't, but I will have gotten some grammar Nazi's heart racing just
Re:Headline appears to be inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
TFA isn't that in-depth. Here's another source
http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/consumer-activist-kate-hanni-a.html [dallasnews.com]
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It's a Yahoo server, and it seems the domain is registered to Foreman himself.
Whois record for mmi-gov.com:
[Querying whois.internic.net]
[Redirected to whois.melbourneit.com]
[Querying whois.melbourneit.com]
[whois.melbourneit.com]
Domain Name.......... mmi-gov.com
Creation Date........ 2004-09-08
Registration Date.... 2004-09-08
Expiry Date.......... 2011-09-08
Organisation Name.... Frederick J Foreman
Organisation Address. 14525 Chamberry C
people are spoiled these days (Score:2, Funny)
Who does she think she is, the Pope?!
Re:people are spoiled these days (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm old enough to remember the days of air travel before deregulation. It was very expensive and you had to dress well, but you were treated with respect. There were even SST sticker books for the kids.
It would be interesting to see an airline with only business class and first class. How long would it stay in business?
Air vs. Rail (Score:5, Interesting)
My parents are bringing our whole family to Cimarron, NM for Christmas, and already booked flights. To get there, I'm going to have to leave my home in the middle of the day and drive 25 miles to the airport. I'll have to get there an hour early and go through an intrusive security check. They'll also make me pay more for my bags at the airport. I'll then have to walk to the gate and wait there, then board in a line, then settle into my cramped seat and wait on the tarmac. I'll have to keep my electronics off until we reach cruising altitude. We'll then have to fly to the hub in Chicago, doing all of the previous stuff in reverse for landing and disembarkment, layover, and re-boarding. We'll then fly to Amarillo and do everything in reverse. I'll be landing in Amarillo after dark. Then I'll have to get a hotel because it'll be too late to reach Cimarron. So the next day I'll then be renting a car and driving 250 miles to Cimarron (no sizable airports near it) and get there in the afternoon. On the return trip, all of this will happen in reverse.
Well, I decided to check, and sure enough, there's an Amtrak stop 85 miles from my house and another 40 miles from Cimarron, with a direct line between them. So instead, I could leave my house at shortly before 6 in the evening, get on a train at around 7:30 with almost no waiting at the station, settle into whatever comfortable seat I want (I find rail travel to be *much* more comfortable than air travel), have a power outlet for my laptop, recline way back and sleep from 11 to 9 AM, get off at 11:30 AM, and get to Cimarron just after noon. With all costs added in, significantly cheaper, way more comfortable, saves six hours of driving, no hellish airport experiences, and faster. And way less environmental impact.
This may be an extreme case, but most people don't ever bother thinking to check to see whether a train can get them to their destination reasonably. A lot of people use the argument that as a less population-dense country, the US can't support rail. Well, population density arguments apply to *every* mode of public transportation, including air. Less population dense areas means fewer airports and fewer flights.
I loved riding the rails around Japan. Back in the US, get the speeds up and add more tracks, and at least I personally will ride them most places I go.
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Well, population density arguments apply to *every* mode of public transportation, including air.
Air travel is not a public mode of transportation. And contrary to your assertion, it is a beneficiary of the lower population density of the US. For example, the low population density helps reduce air traffic clutter. And it meshes relatively well with the automobile. If you want to get same day travel anywhere in the US, then airlines are a good choice. It fills a niche that cars can't cover properly, that is fast travel over around a few hundred miles. Conversely, if you want to travel short distances w
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Is it not "available for use by the general public, as opposed to modes for private use such as automobiles or vehicles for hire"?
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Air travel is not a public mode of transportation.
Commercial aircraft are glorified flying buses.
And despite your assertion of how great air travel works with our system, I can assure you, it certainly sucks in terms of getting to where I'm trying to get to. And flying these days is, as mentioned, a rather miserable experience, while train travel is relaxing.
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And despite your assertion of how great air travel works with our system, I can assure you, it certainly sucks in terms of getting to where I'm trying to get to. And flying these days is, as mentioned, a rather miserable experience, while train travel is relaxing.
That's because you had a fluke situation where you actually had a better alternative that was competitive with air/car travel in terms of time and cost. That usually isn't the case in the US in my view. And contrary to your assertion, I merely stated that it works well with automobiles and low population density regions, which it does. I said nothin
Re:Air vs. Rail (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Air vs. Rail (Score:4, Insightful)
For the itinerary you found, an 18-hour trip, you should probably expect to add a random number of hours from 0 to 6 into your arrival time.
Agreed. But in fairness to Amtrak, you'd probably do well to add that kind of margin to a flight as well.
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We have trains in the UK - for cities less than 100 miles away, it's definitely quicker than taking a plane, as the journey will only take around 3 hours, less time than checking in, security and picking up baggage at an airport. Though there are some disadvantages to long distance train journeys in the UK - some passengers, particularly oil workers, seem to treat trains like public bars, and get drunk before and after coming the oil rigs. Whenever this happens, the air conditioning will seem to be "broken"
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Wow, your experience with trains is totally different than mine (a few trips in California and three weeks spent travelling across Japan on trains). I've found them to be clean, quite, comfortable, and relaxing.
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Inter-city trains in Finland are much better - fairly comfy with non-poisonous food. Also, they are never over-booked; if you reserve a seat, you get it. Alas, despite the trains being subsidized, it's not always cheaper than flying. In particular, for travel between Hels
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Wow, your experience with trains is totally different than mine (a few trips in California and three weeks spent travelling across Japan on trains). I've found them to be clean, quite, comfortable, and relaxing.
It's variable. Some lines have rather old rolling stock in use, but others are really modern. But most of the problem is due to the sheer number of people using the service; UK trains are very busy and the peculiarities of how the whole system works makes upgrading the number of carriages difficult. (Not sure why.)
OTOH, for comparison I commute by train. My route requires the use of two trains in each direction with a transfer, and the endpoint stations are about a mile from my destination in each direction
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Citation urgently needed. £200 for a holiday to new york? It might get you a holiday to York. £200 would hardly pay for hoStel accommodation and food/drink over a 3 or 4 day trip from Britain to New York.
If you need protection from the oiks (toliets messy, drinking!!) you could pay for first class? I myself have had very little trouble on trains in
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London to Edinburgh by train, every time. It's faster, it's more convenient, and it's more comfortable. I can get to King's Cross faster than LHR, LGW, or any other London airport, I don't have to check in early, baggage is easier to deal with (even on the Tube and it's shockingly poor access) and I arrive in the centre of Edinburgh.
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for cities less than 100 miles away, it's definitely quicker than taking a plane
I should certainly hope so. Would you seriously even consider a plane for a 100 mile trip?
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IF you are traveling an island locations surrounded by water, there might not be a train or ferry to get you there.
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Eyeballing a map of Europe, I suppose the first half of my trip would be a bit like starting in Birmingham, England, driving to Heathrow (with elk instead of London drivers),
Flights from Birmingham to Budapest only cover about 1,000 miles.
Though to be fair, Yellowstone Park to Sacramento, CA is only about 800 miles and Google Maps reckons it's driveable in 15 hours. I've no idea where your "3-4,000 miles of flying" comes from unless it's a typo - Anchorage to New York is only about 4,300 miles.
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Starting near Birmingham is like starting near LA or Chicago. Birmingham is the country's second biggest city and hence has plenty of other travel options. Try Exeter, or Keswick or Inverness, etc, or better, the Scilly Isles or Orkney.
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Not flying the red eye, luxury.
40 KM, you are complaining about 40 KM. any decent city planning will have an express-way or rail line to the airport. 40 KM is less then an hour on a freeway and the middle of the day (10:00-15:00) is not peak hour.
I dont know about you but I like leaving on time, this requires e
Re:Air vs. Rail (Score:5, Informative)
drive 25 miles to the airport.
40 KM, you are complaining about 40 KM. any decent city planning will have an express-way or rail line to the airport. 40 KM is less then an hour on a freeway and the middle of the day (10:00-15:00) is not peak hour.
Typical big city tunnel vision. I live in eastern *Iowa*. The airport is between a city of 60,000 and a city of 100,000. And that's pretty much it in the area apart from small towns, corn, soybeans, and hog farms. There are usually three active gates at the airport. There is no practical "peak hour".
Sit in a comfortable seat with individual IFE in the seat back plus laptop and USB power.
A seat like that costs ~$600-$900 cross-country, and wouldn't be available for my first leg at all. Who do you think you are, criticizing me for not taking the red eye and then talking about your first-class style seating? Not taking the red-eye is just a matter of booking well in advance and not insisting on direct flights. Perhaps you have unlimited money, but most of the world doesn't.
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-1 not doing your research. Perth, Western Australia (IATA: PER) is one of Australia's smallest cities, 1.8 Million.
City size is irrelevant, planning is what counts. Perth International airport is situated off two of our main highways Tokin and Leach highway. You can be expected to get to the airport within an hour from 90% of the metropolitan area. Singapore Changi International Airport and Kuala Lumpur International Airports each have a dedicated rail line, Bangkok Suva
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-1 not doing your research. Perth, Western Australia (IATA: PER) is one of Australia's smallest cities, 1.8 Million.
1.8 million. Vs. perhaps 200,000 scattered across a rural countryside. You honestly don't see the difference here?
40 KM is nothing
Again, I don't know why you're focusing so much on the trip from my house to the airport so much, when it's the 400 kilometer trip on the other end that's the killer. Or did you want me to leave out certain parts of the trip out of fear that you'd decide to use t
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Air travel is less expensive than rail in most cases for me. I'd love to take a train to my most common destinations of Dallas and Kansas City, even a straight shot on the Texas Eagle from Union Station in Los Angeles to Dallas is showing up as a 48-hour trip costing $118 each direction using a AAA discount. The seats do look more comfortable than an airline seat, but being cooped up on a train for two days won't sit well with me.
Even going up to San Francisco is difficult. Taking a train from Union Stat
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I have no idea if this example was picked because it's particularly bad, but I hope you're not deducing that rail travel as an idea is bad beca
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They were examples of travel that I sometimes undertake that are not at all unusual. The trip from Union Station to Oakland is on a single train (the Coast Starlight). Amtrak has other offers, but they involve either being on a bus for three hours from Los Angeles to Bakersfield before taking a six-hour train to Oakland (with only 15 minutes to get from the bus to the train) or a five-hour bus ride to San Luis Obispo before taking a six-hour train ride to Oakland.
I'm not aiming at the concept of train tra
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Some of my friends have, for economic reasons, made extensive use of buses over the years. They despise them for the quality of the ride, the amount of time it takes, and the type and sanitary condition of the other people that ride them. It's been many years since I've taken a bus myself, but having dropped them off or picked them up from the bus stations, I'm inclined to believe my friends' tales.
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I've tried trains, they just don't make sense on most trips. Even in what's supposed to be the best train area in America, the "Northeast Corridor", a Delta Shuttle flight booked in advance is still half the price and half the time of a train ride (regular or Acela) from New York to either D.C. or Boston.
Are you doing a door-to-door analysis? This matters because trains often win for reducing the non-train parts of the journey; there are a lot of overheads at an airport. (Of course, if you're going real long distance, flying makes huge sense, overwhelming the airport costs. If you're going intercontinental... flying is the only practical option at all unless you like multi-day boat trips.)
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I check, and without fail the train tends to far more expensive than a flight. Or, takes 12
I've had the same experience (Score:2)
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Back in the US, get the speeds up and add more tracks, and at least I personally will ride them most places I go.
They're working on it. Right now in Illinois there are plans for high speed rail service from Chicago to St Louis. In Springfield they're fighting over using the 3rd street corridor or the 10th street corridor. The railroad wants to use the 3rd street corridor because it's more money for them, everybody else wants the 10th street corridor.
But eventually we'll have it. Of course, their idea of "hi
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The Southwest Chief is a nice train, I live in Kansas and have taken it to both its terminal cities, as well as Cimarron/Raton. It can get going pretty fast out west, I clocked it going 100mph on my GPS. Now I'm a pilot though, so if I need to go somewhere in an emergency, I can just rent an airplane and fly without all the TSA crap.
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Trains are also much less vulnerable than planes. If there's a major malfunction on a plane, it crashes; a train just stops.
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Trains are also much less vulnerable than planes. If there's a major malfunction on a plane, it crashes; a train just stops.
If you blow up a high speed train you could kill everybody on board. Trains carry more people than aircraft. Time your bang correctly and you could take out a train going the other way.
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Certainly didn't happen in Japan. Train travel over there is still a dream -- even after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks.
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Yeah, that's pretty much all Cimarron is known for these days, isn't it? :) My uncle has a vacation house in view of the Tooth of Time.
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In what manner? The killer is the 250 mile drive to Cimarron because there are no nearby airports. They booked the most direct flight possible -- one from my regional airport to a central hub (Chicago), and from there to Amarillo (one of the closest airports).
One of the nice things about rail, in terms of providing service, is that a plane can't just stop and pick more people up along the way -- not without a ~1-2 hour delay (when you include the reduction in flight speeds during landing/takeoff and the t
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About one quarter until they had to release their earnings and all the investors pulled out.
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It would be interesting to see an airline with only business class and first class. How long would it stay in business?
Singapore Airlines [wikipedia.org] is doing pretty well. They don't match your requirements perfectly, but they do fly some business-only flights (e.g. the Newark->Singapore non-stop), and their "economy" service beats most American carriers' business for comfort.
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See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxjet [wikipedia.org]
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverjet [wikipedia.org]
For possible answers to your question....
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It was very expensive and you had to dress well
The last time I flew was the early eighties, and I wore blue jeans and a t-shirt. Same as when I flew commercially in the USAF in the early seventies. On one occassion I actually wore dress blues instead of my customary blue jeans, and they upgraded my ticket from coach to first class without charging me.
I don't remember it being expensive, iirc a one way ticket from St Louis to DC was about $100. And you could pay cash, didn't show ID, and didn't have to take
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the last one Augured-In [wikipedia.org]
Looked like more of a mush to me.
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The Concord comes to mind, but when the last one Augured-In just past the runway at Eiffel-Tower-X, Concord immediately went bankrupt.
Uh, no.
The Concorde which crashed in Paris was the first (and only) such crash of a Concorde. However, the Concorde fleet (operated by British Airways and Air France, there was no such company as Concord to go bankrupt) was aging and becoming increasingly expensive to operate between maintenance, fuel costs, and post 9/11 regulations. They did return to service for a short
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Am I the only one who thought that the obvious solution to this is to simply shit in the aisle?
If enough people do it, I'm sure the airlines will change their minds ;-) --you
XP
X(
X(
^^^ The people in the next seats
Delta "clearly, obviously" innocent (Score:5, Insightful)
Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."
Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.
Re:Delta "clearly, obviously" innocent (Score:4, Insightful)
But they certainly belong in the statements of anybody speaking on behalf of the corporation. The originators of these types of comments are always PR, marketing, legal and executive people. Which is also why I think that there a special place in hell that should be reserved for them.
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They only speak this way because our legal system awards ridiculous sums to people who claim a corporation did them wrong regardless of the real damages done. Hopefully there is an even better place in hell for these crazies that get rich off of bullshit lawsuits. The corps are just trying to protect themselves so they don't have to shut their doors tomorrow. Clearly you would understand if you have seen the shit companies get thrown at them. Maybe this case is a legit one, maybe it is not, but the corp
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I've directly seen the lawsuit that are thrown at companies. I've also seen everyone in my list speak internally about cases I was intimately involved in. I found that that kind of talk was always there, regardless of how blatantly bad the situation might be.
As for your comment about irony, it is possible to dislike frivolous lawsuits as much as corporate double-speak. Just as an FYI.
Re:Delta "clearly, obviously" innocent (Score:4, Insightful)
"Obviously" has drifted into everyday corporate parlance, and it's very irritating to me. It is the audible equivalent of the long-running lose/loose spelling issue across the Internet -- I just notice it every time. We have sales people come in that are demonstrating products we've never seen before, and they talk about how their product can "obviously" perform some function. If it were obvious that it did all of these things, we wouldn't have them here. And it comes across as demeaning, because we didn't know those features were included, but by saying that they "obviously" were there and yet we were ignorant of them, it comes across as suggesting that we didn't do our homework or weren't bright enough to realize how superior their product was.
I have stopped one in mid-sentence and pointed out this problem. To his credit, he tried to avoid the word, and caught himself using it several more times, correcting himself each time. I should try that on more of them.
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Another story on the lawsuit currently circulating on the wires includes this nugget: "Through a spokesman, Delta denied that it was involved in any hacking. 'Obviously, the idea that Delta would hack into someone’s email is clearly without merit,' spokesman Trebor Banstetter wrote in an email."
He's quite right. There are outside companies you can pay to do that for you.
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Without prejudging the facts in the case, I'm not sure that "clearly" and "obviously" are adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of a huge corporation.
In the case of corporations, prejudging the facts in the case is almost always warranted. "Clearly" and "obviously" are always adverbs that belong in any statement relating to wrongdoing on the part of any huge corporation.
High Speed Rail (Score:4, Insightful)
Busy routes like LA-SF, LA-Phoenix, and Miami-Atlanta could easily be replaced by fast trains [wsj.com] and therefore take a lot of load off of our air and highway infrastructure at a relatively small price.
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Californians thought so, that's why they approved the California High Speed Rail [ca.gov]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. It's a $40 billion, 30-year project to build a train that will get from San Diego to San Francisco in under four hours.
Except that San Francisco has said that it can't terminate there, and land prices and structures may force it to go around the Los Angeles area. And there are stops on such a frequent basis that the train will be spending as much time in acceleration/deceleration as it will be at cruise speed, possibly extending the trip to as much as ten hours -- a little slower than the eight hours
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Train vs. plane is certainly an option, except for track right-of-way.
Train vs. car has major problems in that once you are there, you need your car to get around. Usually this is the whole reason for taking the car in the first place.
Then there is the right-of-way problem. Trains were replaced by trucks for most freight in the US around 1960 or 1970. I believe there was some major deregulation that changed the cost structure for trucking about that time. This pretty much ended passenger rail service in
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Train vs. car has major problems in that once you are there, you need your car to get around.
If there was more demand for hire cars, they would get cheaper.
And there's no reason not to have trains that you can drive on to and drive off so you could take your car with you.
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Really, you mean now that there's a high speed rail between LA-Phoenix, I living on the east coast will jump on a plane and then ride this rail service b/c it's there? Now, that expanded traffic is what creates a multiplier effect for infrastructure spending/investment.
Re:High Speed Rail (Score:4, Insightful)
High speed rail won't be filled. The cost to add another car to the train is completely marginal compared to the basic infrastructure needed to start service. With airlines, planes are the most expensive part of the process, and they don't scale. Every plane needs another crew, ground crew, etc.
For $11 Million (Score:3, Funny)
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You forgot about the part where you would also have to start an advocacy group and work hard enough to piss someone off enough to care about.
Re:For $11 Million (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot about the part where you would also have to start an advocacy group and work hard enough to piss someone off enough to care about.
Great point. What would I have to do for just $5 million?
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Back to the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Larger corps have a few game plans:
1. Pay off and you stop.
2. Discredit with a "past", real, hyped or almost created.
3. Useless busy work via infiltration and re directing. Or a personality implosion of the groups eg COINTELPRO.
A fishing expedition? Looking for leaks, press contacts and members.
The planting of logger.
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At first I thought it was a haiku, but then I counted syllables.
Momentary confusion on what you meant by "the planting of logger"... for some reason I thought it had something to do with environmental activists in the PacNW. Must be past my bedtime.
Anyway, I've cleaned up your haiku:
Email - leaky boat
A fishing expedition
Planted keylogger
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HP showed the reaction if its an internal leak.
If they are getting raw docs from the corp, it will have to be stopped.
If consumer rights group are using public info, is more easy to let it slip in the press.
The Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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No offense intended, but I've read the article, and the bill of rights items are things I consider to be an extremely low bar.
Three hours of sitting on the tarmac, knowing that even after the plane takes off you have to endure the flying time as well, would be very stressful to me. For a short flight, it could double or triple the time spent in that can. For a long flight, it could turn an eight-hour flight into eleven hours.
The others are just absurd to think of being missing. Air? Medical attention?
So do we get to go now? (Score:2)
So all this aside, does this mean I can sit up and use the bathroom when I need to , if we are grounded, because we all know the expert training it takes to be an airline stewardess, and the amount of hours spent walking on a wobbly surface.
I mean seriously, if they stoop this low to get an advantage against this bill, I think they should be put in their place.