It is nice to be able to carry around what used to require an entire office in your pocket or in a small bag. Where there used to be a time when communications, the preparation and distribution of reports and the organization of schedules were the domain of an entire group of workers, now it can all be done by one or two of the right pieces of technology. And for this, the world is so grateful that it has become downright dependent on the capacity to carry around that which used to be grounded to one spot. If it ever came to pass that all of these 3g and 4g networks came to a screeching halt, a whole lot of people would find themselves doing badly in a hurry.

After all, it was not even that long ago when laptops were little more than just an extra bit of baggage, designed to allow you to play minesweeper in between writing reports that it is very possible that no one would ever read. Nowadays, as our nation’s air spaces are criss crossed by a massive wireless network, you can do almost anything from your laptop in an airplane that you could do in your actual, physical office… as if anybody besides the custodian actually needs to go to those primitive old things anymore.

You can transfer very, very large files and data with FTP programs like the one available for free on the FileZilla Server. You can watch free video and streaming television with you Windows Media player.  And there is much more you can do easily that would have been unheard of before.

In our modern world, laptops are even seem as something of an “old hat” legacy device. While they are now as powerful as desktop tower PCs, they have largely been eclipsed from a functional standpoint by the smart phones and the tablet PCs of the world. Why would you carry around a clumsy old laptop, when you can simply reach into your pocket and whip out a sleek, ultra modern smart phone that can do at least half of the functions (and if you believe the ads, all of the important ones)? But what ever happened to just sleeping on a flight?