PriceSCAN Blog

First, in days of terrorism, this is a bewildering load of stuff. There is no way that any average agent at a check-in station could have any reasonable idea of what all of the electronics are. It's tough enough for me to understand and I have 50 years of experience with computers. I can only be sympathetic with how difficult it would be for someone untrained in the electronic arts. If there is any serious threat that could be delivered (I'm not sure there is) I'd expect this kind of stuff to be banned if anti-terrorist departments ever get their act together.

Second, there are some much more mundane and practical considerations that have nothing particular to do with travel and/or terrorism. These have to do with the simple activity of plugging in devices in your home. The number of devices that I have that need to be plugged in seems to have grown dramatically in the just the past few years.

Those of you who are old enough might want to think back a few years. If I remember correctly, my first PC had just one major power cord. The display also had a power cord, but there was a socket on the backplane of the computer that fed this and so there was only need to use one wall socket to power the whole thing. By contrast the computer I am using as I write this has separate power cables for:

1. the computer,
2. the sound system,
3. the master display,
4. the support display,
5. an auxillary storage unit,
6. a joystick,
7. the cable modem,
8. my network hub,
9. and the printer,

not to mention any of the support equipment which also shares my desktop with the computer. To handle it I now have a twelve socket power cable to supply the necessary local connections. It's nearly full.

It's nuisance enough just to manage the plugs. What makes the problem worse is that these days it is not uncommon for plug heads to be imbedded directly in transformers which are not only ugly, they are huge and unwieldy. This often means that a single plug will cover two or three sockets, and I am lucky if the plugs mentioned above will even fit in a twelve socket power distribution strip.

Even Apple, which normally gets such high marks for human design, often fails on this front. Their equipment almost invariably looks good, but runs into the same kind of problem. For example, the head of the power train for my iPod is a nice looking little box that often has to be plugged into a wall in such a way that it covers more than one socket. This makes an unnecessary problem in lots of situations.

One must guess that proprietary plugs are a real profit item for the companies that insist on them. They surely aren't in the interest of most of us as consumers. It would be nice for all of us if there could be some decent standardization in this area, but I suppose that will have to await a time when the profits from the proprietary aspects of the current situation dwindle sufficiently that the customer's good can become the driving force.