Believe it or not, I read about the reporter`s foul up and retraction on IHub, per Cass (I KNOW, maybe not the most reliable source, though he/she also posted info garnered via email with the reporter). However, I have it also (indirectly) from a company source. To clarify: the reporter mis-spoke re: the order being for digEsystem units. He saw ethernet in the EDIG PR and jumped to conclusions....

As for the credit card swipe; we`ve read that this feature is to be on new units (so somewhat conjecture on my part since it wasn`t mentioned in the latest PR - sorry folks!). However, it seems to me that this would be the reason to have ethernet - to collect charging data at flight`s end for transmittal for payment. Seems that these two things go hand-in-hand. Without ethernet, the credit card swipe feature would necessitate an added labor-intensive, time consuming effort, which isn`t in line with known efforts to relieve the logistics burden. Could you imagine having to manually hook up to each digE to gather this data after every flight? They, IMO, wouldn`t add ethernet just for content updates that only happen once every 60-90 days. Of course there are other added benefits to including ethernet, like more frequent content (newspapers?) updates if they so choose. But we haven`t heard anything along these lines except in conjunction with the coming digEsystem. Seems that if something like that were to be offered via the ethernet-enabled digEplayers, they would almost certainly have mentioned it in the PR (though this argument may be weak, since they didn`t mention credit card swipe capability in that PR either).

So I suppose the credit card swipe issue may be of my own making....it just makes sense to me.

But that`s why I usually offer the caveat in my ``opine posts`` - I KNOW nuttin`!

SGE