Beagle
IMHO there is only one reason to care who uses the access point: somebody downloading child porn, or transferring some other illegal material (e.g. posting something on pprune that is a breach of the Official Secrets Act
).
The flying club isn't going to be liable in such cases, any more than an internet cafe would be. Your liability starts only once you become notified of the alleged offence, and then you can do something about it. I doubt a flying club would be targeted; I count over 80 access points over a 10 mile drive with a PDA running Netstumbler and 2/3 of them are wide open, so some perv only has to drive another 100 yards.
Plain WEP security, with the password written openly on the club notice board, would do just fine.
shortstripper
I am sure we would get on just fine
There is a place for everybody in GA.
However I fundamentally disagree that the circular slide rule is a useful
teaching aid for anything whatsoever.
The slide rule has two sides.
One side is a conventional slide rule, as was used by all real engineers for mult/div throughout the first half of the 20th century. It also just happens to have supposedly handy markings on it for common conversions e.g. 0.72kg=1 litre of avgas, but nearly all people that use it don't know this. They never used a slide rule so don't know this and really believe it is a dedicated aviation converter of some sort. In this context, any pocket calculator is vastly better, and most people have those coming out of their ears, and they don't stop working when the Americans drop a load of bombs in the Midle East.
The other side is a specialised calculator for solving the wind triangle. It's accurate to better than 1 degree. But as with all computers, garbage in = garbage out. Do you know the typical error in the Form 214 today? I give you a challenge: Pick any day when there is any significant wind at say 5000ft (most days in the UK), get up there (with a GPS, no other way practical to do it) and measure the actual wind. Then apply the F214 error to the calculation done with the slide rule. How much better or worse would a simple rule of thumb (e.g. max drift = 1/2 the wind, at typical spamcan speeds) be? I think you would be suprised. On the average day, the accuracy of the slide rule is totally wasted.
The other crucial point is that always flies a heading, even if using a GPS. This facilitates a fallback toother nav methods. I had to do that once, for 2 minutes, off Italy, in 5 years of flying with GPS.