Hasta La Gadget!

Since the dawn of the jet age, there has been safety concerns in the airline industry, but today would be the safest period ever, so if you are scared of flying on a commercial jetliner, it would never have been safer. In fact, for folks living in the US, it has been exactly four years since the last fatal crash happened there, making it an unmatched record to date. Around the globe, 2012 marked the safest year since World War 2 ended in 1945, where 23 deadly accidents and 475 fatalities were recorded according to the Aviation Safety Network, which was less compared to under half the 1,147 deaths which happened in 42 crashes in the year 2000.

Do bear in mind that flying might be safer than ever, but it is not entirely risk-free. With air traffic set to grow in the next 10 years, airports will get more congested, and statistically speaking, it would also increase the number of near-misses on runways and taxiways, with the element of an accident risk going up as well. If there is a takeaway message from this story, do bear in mind that a traveler could fly every day for an average of 123,000 years before being involved in a fatal crash. Pretty good odds compared to driving, or even being a pedestrian, no?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: In-City GPS Tracking Accuracy Improved By Up To 90%, Griff’s Back to the Future 2 ‘Pit Bull’ Hoverboard On Sale For $13k,

A new deal is in the works this week that would have Google running their own fabulous Google-branded airport out of San Jose has been reported this week, city approval and all. This report comes from the current San Jose airport where officials are “urging” the city to sign a deal that would allow two private companies to fund an $82 million dollar facility on land that up until now has been a west-side parking lot near the airfield. Google would, if approved, be flying Google-branded aircraft in and out of the area.

This deal is being penned by Signature Aviation and Blue City Holdings, the latter company being the one that currently represents the Google fleet. At the moment Google has a set of aircraft owned and operated by the company, each of them used for private Google flights – CEOs and the like. The memo this week would include a 29-acre plot made to house the planes as well as a main airport ticketing/baggage/general boarding area.

The lease with Signature and Blue City Holdings would have them using the area for “at least 50 years” where standard airport leases, according to Mercury News, tend to last between 20 and 30 years. Currently it’s at the Moffett Federal Airfield that Google aircraft are housed on the whole. Aviation Director Bill Sherry spoke up on the matter this week saying that all the way back in 2005 Google has approached the San Jose airport for a similar facility, but that back at that time, not enough space was to be had.

The proposal will be seen by the San Jose city council later this month, specifically by the council’s Airport Competitiveness Committee. This will be the first step in a series of reviews which will be completed by a full city council vote this Spring.

Sound like a fabulous sort of situation to you? It’s not just private Google employees that will be riding out on the Google flights flying out of San Jose. Would you ride a Google Airlines aircraft? Or are you move of a Virgin Airlines sort of traveler?

[via Gizmodo]

Google Airport set for San Jose, California is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

After the FAA decided to ground all Boeing 787 Dreamliners last month, a massive investigation began to determine the cause of the battery failures inside the new planes. It turns out that the batteries were overheating and literally melting. However, in order to get all 50 Dreamliners back up in the air, Boeing will be redesigning the battery as a temporary fix.

The battery redesign would minimize the risk of a meltdown happening, thus reducing the risk of a fire on board, which is what was suspected of happening in the past on the new planes. Again, it’s not Boeing’s permanent solution, but they say it’s the quickest way to get the planes back up in the air the safest way.

The redesigned batteries will have more space and separation between cells, and Boeing is also planning to add enhanced heat sensors. Plus, the company also plans to make the battery cells more rigid to keep them from moving around. We’re not sure if the cells were prone to moving around beforehand, but either way, it looks like Boeing is fully committed to using lithium-ion batteries in the 787, rather than nickel-cadmium batteries found in most other planes.

Boeing has hundreds of engineers and other experts working around the clock to resolve this issue, but there’s no word one when the new planes will be ready to fly again. The last we heard, investigations were going smoothly, but there was no rush to get the aircrafts back in service, so it could be a while before we see them in the air again.

[via WSJ]

Boeing to redesign 787 battery as a temporary fix is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Commuters, kids, business travelers and anyone on the move: How would
you like to carry a lite-weight version of your computer on your wrist?
While Cloud Computing is definitely the wave of the future, with
hundreds of millions of PCs shipping each year, a good amount of today’s
computing happens locally. And to that end, StormFly has found the
answer to moving complete operating systems between devices, quickly,
easily and securely.

While Foursquare may only seem like a check-in app that you use to tell your friends how jealous they should be, the service also allows users to review restaurants and other attractions just like on Yelp, and give it a 0-10 rating. Today, Foursquare has released the “Best of 2012” list that chock full of the best places to go in a given city, crowd-sourced by the users themselves.

While there are a ton of similar lists floating around the internet, Foursquare’s lists are quite unique, and the company says that while other sites’ lists are based upon the editors’ opinions or food critics, Foursquare rounds up the billions of check-ins that they have to see what the most popular places are in town.

The company uses tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly three billion check-ins from over 30 million people around the world to determine how popular and good a certain place is. However, Foursquare has only made Best Of lists for a handful of cities in the US, including Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, and more.

What’s perhaps most interesting about these lists, is that Foursquare discovered that certain cities have unique tastes in food: “Bostonians love seafood, Portland is a veggie paradise, and Philly may be the city of brotherly love, but what they really love is a good sandwich.” Clicking on a city reveals the best restaurants in the area, as well as the best nightlife destinations, and attractions.

Foursquare crowd-sources Best of 2012 lists for 30 cities is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.