Why United Does Not Allow You To Use In-Flight Screen As Extended Display

Bro, relax

Carries entire homelab onto plane so who's up for a LAN party? I'm hosting.
- You joke, but I have absolutely created an ad-hoc wireless network and gamed with people I'm traveling with on a flight before.
- Id fucking love this
There are very very few things that I believe deserve summary and immediate execution, and that's just made the list.
I never recline my seat, but if I was sitting infront of that guy I would move it down for a bit. Then up again. Then down again. Etc for however long the flight is
Seriously. What a fucking ridiculous "problem". The photos in this article are absurd.

I'm already annoyed when someone is using their phone in the dark and doesn't adjust the brightness settings.

If you do this during night flights, sincerely, fuck you.

How?! How can they stand it themselves and not feel like they're being blinded?
- They're just not letting their eyes get dark-adapted in the first place. They can't see anything but the phone screen, but they also don't care.
My wife does this. At 2am. Often mid week. And wonders why I wake up in the middle of the night and grumpy.

If it’s wireless someone will be sent porn by the creep 2 rows back.

yeah this whole article was an unnecessary rant which the author realized only after publishing.
Update: A reader writes in with an obvious comment that did not occur to me:
The obvious reason not to let people put things on the screens you own in public is that invariably people will put porn on them, and then you'll have other people complaining that the united screen system is showing porn. They don't say this because no corporate PR hack is going to talk about porn when it's not necessary. But it's definitely the real reason, and it's one they will not and should not budge on.
- Ah, the times when all phones and laptops in Tesco were unlocked for testing by customers and playing porn every day.
- Reminds me of the time when I was living in Phoenix and picking up a friend from the bus station. The bus departures came in one big door and right next to the door was one of them new standing internet kiosks that allowed you to browse the internet. This was back in 2003. I was checking it out to see what you could do and where it allowed you to go, when my friends bus came in. I was on goatse.cx and saw my friend and left the kiosk open and we went to leave and noticed many older Hispanic folks freaking out, or laughing as they entered the bus station. The timer ran out on the internet access, but it was a lot of fun with open monitors in public.
- Then you'll still have people screencast porn to their own screen, photograph it and post it on social media with a title like "United's in-flight entertainment".
It would be pretty easy to require accepting a screenshare with a button press on the target screen. So I don't think trolling other people's displays is the main concern.
- Seems you don’t understand how often people just click ‘OK’ without thinking.
There's no reason they couldn't expose an HDMI port, or even provide a cable that runs down the seat to the tray table.

I worked in a wine shop that had banks of conputers that people could ise to look up reviewer’s rating on wines or place orders on our website. I ended up having to get IT to lock them down to only 6-7 websites because people would use them to try to access their banking. I had to explain to way too many people with jobs in high finance the risks of them doing this on a public computer. Too many idiots would do banking on a flight only to get robbed.

The article is about extended displays though. No traces left.
And The last time I flew the displays had viewing angles tht made it so only you could see the display, sp they were actually more private than laptops.
- I've never seen angle protection on those screens and I've flown multiple carriers with them.
- No traces but you are still sharing your financials on a screen
When I bought my house it took the old owner ages to reroute all of her mail to whatever her new address was. At one point sje had a credit card sent to her and it came to my house along with the PIN number.
If I'd been so inclined I could have withdrawn all the money from her account.
Meanwhile when I moved in I spent the first 2 days basically doing nothing other than making sure all of my mail was coming to my new address.
People are just really bad at thinking
- Right? I keep a list of every single company/service that I gave my email address, physical address, or phone number to. Every time I give it out I add it to the list. When it needs changing I go through the list and update it in all of them.

I just want to know when I can connect my noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones to the display instead of the tinny pair of wired "maraccas" that I keep in my travel bag.

Idk, 150 people in a tin can all using Bluetooth could cause issues.
It would be better to get noise cancelling headphones with a 3.5mm headphone jack. I had some until my daughter broke them, and I loved them.
- Loads of people use Bluetooth devices on airplanes already. Are there any reports of destructive interference as is?
- If it could, planes would be dropping right and left. It hasn't been an issue in several decades
The second we get a better short range wireless protocol so there aren't a hundred Bluetooth devices jamming each other on the plane.
If you travel a lot they do make airplane headphones that have a 3.5mm connector and run noise cancelling.
- I've been on budget flights where the in-flight infotainment was an app on your phone which connects to a media server on the plane. Everyone was watching with Bluetooth headphones and there were no issues.
They make a thing for that.

People can’t behave themselves in public. Even more so on airplanes.

Reason is a shit rag, and I don't think their slop should be posted.

I think they're one of the better ones since they tend to cite their sources clearly. Media bias fact check agrees with me as well.
They are super biased though, and you'll get something between a libertarian and Republican lite perspective (think socially liberal Republicans). They absolutely shouldn't be your only source of news and they're very selective about what they cover, but when it comes to factual accuracy, they're pretty good.
Perhaps you disagree with their political bias, but that doesn't make them inaccurate. I highly recommend reading some high quality news sources with a different political bias than your own to get a broader perspective. It doesn't have to be Reason, but Reason is a decent option for left-leaning people because the factual accuracy is pretty high and the perspective is so different.
- Reason is libertarian and MBFC has a massive libertarian bias. Reason is a poster child for lying with facts.

What a jackass.

I always thought it was so whatever company they contract with could show their brainwash ads

Yeah, that was my take as well. That, and adding the ability to plug in/connect costs money and probably isn't popular enough to make it charging for it profitable.

Ahh yes, the Volokh Conspiracy:

We're clever enough to come up with a superficially consistent frameworks that permit our awfulness, therefore we should!