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In a study by two industry groups, the Airline Passenger Experience Association and the Consumer Electronics Association, as many as 30 percent of all passengers said they had accidentally left a device on during takeoff or landing.

About 67 percent said they had never done this, always ensuring that their electronics were turned off. Four percent were unsure. In another segment of the study, passengers were asked if they turn their devices to “off” when instructed to do so by the pilot. Although 59 percent of passengers said they do fully turn their electronics off, 21 percent said they often simply switch to “airplane mode,” which disables the main radios of a gadget. Five percent sometimes adhere to the rule. And others were either unsure or do not carry electronic devices on a plane. The device most often left on is the smartphone, the study found. The study found that four out of 10 passengers would like to use their devices during all phases of flight, including takeoff and landing.

A U.S. magistrate judge has granted Apple’s request for an order forcing Google to reveal the search terms it’s using to compile the Android documentation Apple has requested as part of the discovery process in the company’s second patent infringement case against Samsung.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal ordered Google to comply with Apple’s request, gave the company two days to do so and teased the search behemoth for complaining that the request was burdensome in the first place. Said Judge Grewal, “The court cannot help but note the irony that Google, a pioneer in searching the Internet, is arguing that it would be unduly burdened by producing a list of how it searched its own files.”

House Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), subcommittee member Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Rep. Scott Tipton (R-CO) sent a letter to the Department of Commerce’s Inspector General Todd Zinser to applaud plans to audit the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s stimulus grant awarded to EAGLE-Net and request the IG gather additional information to assist the committee’s examination.

The committee has been conducting rigorous oversight of the Obama Administration’s $7 billion broadband stimulus program to examine allegations of waste and overbuilding. In February, the subcommittee held its fourth hearing on the broadband spending and committee leaders recently requested the Government Accountability Office conduct additional oversight of loans and grants in an effort to protect taxpayer dollars. In a letter to the Commerce IG, the members wrote, “The award —at $100.6 million, one of the largest broadband grants under the ARRA — has been a source of controversy. The grant to EAGLE-Net Alliance, originally made to the Colorado Centennial Board of Cooperative Educational Services and subsequently transferred to EAGLE-Net, has been criticized for overbuilding existing infrastructure rather than delivering service to unserved communities.”

Federal Communications Commission Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake shot down the idea of syncing the rollout of a next-generation television standard and the pending spectrum auction and subsequent channel repack to a crowd of broadcast engineers in Washington.

Lake, the keynote speaker at the 2013 Advanced Televisions Systems Committee annual meeting, said all members of the FCC are determined to have a spectrum auction as quickly as possible, adding he doesn't believe that ATSC 3.0 — the next-generation and non-backwards compatible television standard — can be completed and deployed on the commission’s aggressive timetable. "We do perceive a crunch for spectrum coming," Lake said to about 100 people at the Ronald Reagan Center. "We encourage the ATSC to work as fast as they can, but feel it's unrealistic to think the incentive auction would slow down and wait for it to be done." The FCC has said it wants to complete a spectrum auction and channel repack in 18 months.