I once regularly toted my Swiss Army knife on plane trips. I'd toss it into the basket with my keys and wallet and be waved through the metal detector (with shoes still on, mind you), and it was never given a second glance.
I've carried that same poor, battered knife daily for almost 25 years now. In fact, I was denied entrance to a New Year's venue this year because I admitted to having a pocket knife on my person and refused to part with it. $60 wasted. WTF?
Have we become a society of emasculated pansies that fears little pocket knives?
> Have we become a society of emasculated pansies that fears little pocket knives?
Some people are afraid of just about everything.
I make knives. (Some people immediately jump to the conclusion that I must be a nutty survivalist, when the reality is that I just like making things with my hands.) I almost always carry one, whether it's a small folding knife or fixed blade knife.
When I made the first knife, people at work were curious. They asked to see it in a meeting. My boss was very uncomfortable about it and asked me not to make it known I carry a knife to avoid problems with skittish folks.
This is in Montana, where a large number of people own at least one gun and it's incredibly easy to get a concealed weapon permit.
I carry a knife almost everywhere. I regularly carry a 3" lockback (Spyderco Caly 3) but don't usually let anyone know I have it. I was at a work conference a few years ago and that morning I decided not to carry it, partly because I would be around all the company executives and didn't want one of the more skittish ones noticing it. What happens? My CTO needs to open a box and asks me if I have a knife. Arrgh.
my pocket knife is pastel pink for this very reason. Back when I had a scary black knife I was once accused of THREATENING TO STAB SOMEONE after I pulled it out and cut open a box.
I had a pair of nail clippers confiscated entering IAD a few years ago. Just inside the security terminal was the convenience store where i had purchased that set of nail clippers, so I purchased a new set and took them on the plane.
This can be taken one more notch up ridiculousness scale, if the confiscated nail clippers were just taken in the back, re-packed and then sold as you exit out of the security area. "Sir, if you wait half an hour you can come back and purchase your old clippers back"
For a while their was a "no tools" restriction. That one really struck me as odd. Some high-school dropout is given broad powers to play mr. security guy at the airport. I didn't fly for about 2 years after someone made me miss my flight because I had to check a jewelers torx security bit screw driver I had accidentally left in my bag (this was some custom, "let's charge you bucketloads for this bit" style screw driver); as if I'm going to disassemble the plane with that thing. so I decided, fuck them; I was not going to give them my money.
"The device will come equipped with two knife bodies, between which the drive can easily be interchanged with one that is flight-friendly and the other includes traditional Swiss Army Knife implements of a blade, scissors, and screw driver."
Before 9/11 it was legal (per the FAA) to fly with a knife with up to a 4" blade. Some airlines limited blade length to 3". I regularly flew with a 3" folding knife. I could often walk through the metal detectors without even taking the knife out of my pocket if I just put my hand over it and walked slowly. Other times I'd drop it in the basket with my keys and wallet and half the time nobody would even look at it.
I used to regularly fly through Portland, Maine (where some of the 9/11 hijackers boarded) and the security screening staff there were some of the few that always looked at my knife. I felt really horrible to see them on the security videos as the hijackers passed through. It wasn't their failure because boxcutters were allowed at the time.
Which chip are they using? The highest capacity NAND memory on Samsung's website appears to be 256Gbit. Example part number: K9PFGD8U5M (most of the detail is hidden behind an NDA)
I doubt they can stack 32 of these chips into the same thumb drive, so what else is out there?
Physically it should be possible; you have 32GB micro SD-cards, 32 of which take up about 5.3cm^3. That would be about the same as 1.5x5.0x0.7cm, which seems like something that would fit that knife.
Won't (I hope) be long 'til someone offers the 1TB "thumbdrive"* without the baggage (already carry a Benchmade, don't need another in-pocket toybox). Esp. nice having the writable display.
* - am amazed that nobody has yet come up with a suitable, consistent, catchy, universally-accepted name for "tiny solid-state data storage device with ubiquitous interface". Anything with "drive" in the name is an anachronism.
But "usb stick" is so semantically loose, no mention of data, storage, retention, persistency, memory.
Also non persistent, when nobody remembers what USB is, there will be another new lingo like holothumb (yeah cause it will project data holographically right onto your thumbnail so why not).
Too bad for memorycard though it was simple and generic enough. Can't we opensource it ~_~ ?
From first paragraph: "The device will come equipped with two knife bodies, between which the drive can easily be interchanged with one that is flight-friendly"
One thing that appears to be glossed over is how easy this device makes hijacking data from organizations. High-speed, tons of storage, and inconspicuous.
This underscores the importance of having proper access controls and alerts in place to identify anomalous data access.
Even without the $3k quoted elsewhere, the existing prices of SSD harddrives in a much larger form factor should be a good indicator that $3K could easily be on the low-end of pricing.
- Sent from seat 26D