I think most airlines now have enough sheilding around crewed area's and important area's that you can basically use any tech where you want. Well I sat there with my cellphone and media player last time... so.
Honestly I couldn't care less if this is true. I have a DS to play games, I buy the games, Nintendo doesn't care that I'm playing legit games, ergo no problem. I'm guessing that for 98% of people that own a DS and pays for their games legitimately this is a nonissue. Compared to DRM like Ubisoft's where 100% of people paying legitimately have a worse experience compared to a pirate this is awesome. Nintendo doesn't care that they pissed off a few thousand internet geeks and the few thousand internet geeks probably don't care that much because they'll just circumvent this DRM anyways.
Yeah, there are concerns about this for legitimate customers. Wanting to turn off the whoreish wireless function on the device in your pocket sometimes - to avoid being bombarded by advertising, for security, or just to save a lot of battery life - is a reasonable want. There's also the false-positive concern: systems like this usually misfire occasionally and mistake legal tinkering for illegal piracy (Steam does it quite a lot). And when an intrusive DRM system like this makes a mistake, it ****s all of your **** up until you can convince them you're not a pirate - which is a complicated thing to prove. There's a plain objection of principle too concerning this ability of theirs to turn off the console. The issue is not how they use this ability - nobody's saying they shouldn't try to prevent piracy. The issue is that the ability exists at all. Regardless of how it's used - even if it's never used - that ability is a violation and a domination just by its existence. http://nzphilosophy.blogspot.com/2006/01/pettits-freedom-as-non-domination.html
