i love the fact that in this day and age we'd rather stand around and videotape something rather than trying to help out. *sigh* and i wonder why the UFO's aren't landing...

@Sharkbyte: people did try to help out but
1) there was a mysterious voice telling them to back away from the computer
2) the computer seemed to be alive and know when someone was approaching and would flare up when they got close.

Yes! It Blends! Oh, wait ...

DAMN! Can we get a battery that doesn't have the task of sending us to the ER with 3rd-degree burns??

@ Shark - You're very correct and thankfully this was a non-life-threatening issue. Unlike at the shooting at NIU last week when people were taking pics of the injured/bodies leaving the building. Now THAT is disgusting.

oi shabada babada! habada habada babada dada!

OMG save the Pron

:( Taping withour aiding. What has this world come to?

Also, that happened at LAX? That would have to be a major panic. I remember somebody left a laptop in the waiting area and everybody panicked. This one caught on fire. Deng.

They still allow these things on planes?

Damn terrorists.

It seems a bit odd that the cameraperson was filming some random laptop, even before it erupted into flame... shenanigans?

Terrorism. I'm just saying....

Well, she may not be foreign, she may just be a Spanish-speaker. They're born is this country too, folks.

We have no other choice but to engage in brand profiling.

@NightElfMohawk: that was spanish?

@mrface: They edited it a bit. It opens with fire extinguishing powder already around it, and then you see the flames. Clearly it was on fire before the filmer started shooting.

@mrface: Watch the video, you can see the smoke from the get go. Also, I'm sure whomever's lap it was on beforehand felt the heat/smelled the smoke and jumped up, dropping the laptop on the floor, and drew attention to it that way. As for "cameraperson, I think you mean "guy with cameraphone."

@metonae: your exactly the kind of person i'm talking about. "there was a voice telling people to back away"? how does that help? you might as well just say "stand here and watch untill someone else takes care of it, does your cell phone do video? cooool, i'll put this on youtube!" idiot...

@metonae:

Best comment of the day. I'm dead serious...

Had me in stitches for some reason... thank you.

@mrface: I agree, it really does seem suspicious. Why would you be filming a lone laptop on the floor?

I can't make out the foreign language and screaming in the background. Must be Canadians.

She was speaking spanish, but not that great, so my guess is she was born here from spanish speaking parents, she said a computer just exploded and there is alot of fire.

Why oh WHY couldn't that have happened in Boston?

FIREWIRE 3.0 IN DELL LAPTOPS: CONFIRMED!

When you invoke God for a laptop fire, the terrorists have won.

I was hoping a swat team would extinguish the flames with extreme prejudice.

@SharkByte: It's not like an infant was slipping off of a window sill at a party, it's just a friggin' laptop bursting into flames in an open area. I didn't see any invalids or blind toddlers stumbling towards it, so big deal.

@mrface: ScoobyDoo is right, you can see smoky wisps wafting from from the computational device at the beginning of the clippery.

The senseless panic in this video has finally convinved me that we are all dumb apes.

@matto: Now imagine if the computer actually transformed into a small killer spy robot. People would be scrambling saying "Hadabbababaadbaabababaa oooo-oooh AAA AAA AAAA!"

What if that had happened on the plane?? damn that would have been a circus at 30,000 feet.

I can't believe that no one had a bottle of cold water to pour on that thing. it would have shut that thing down in 1 second. Unplug it first though!

what a bunch of hysterical sheople. god I hate sheople.

WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE PORN!?

Anyways, I'm just waiting 'till the day something like that happens inside a plane.
Only THEN, something will be done about this, it seems.

'till then we'll have to keep hearing how these occurances are rare, how they happen on 1 in a million laptops, and stuff like that.

On the joke side: Partyvan prevention system JUST KICKED IN YO!

@NightElfMohawk:

No one is born here speaking Spanish. They might learn it here but they are born without any language skills at all. :)

I hope this doesn't become an excuse to ban laptops from flights.

As pathetic as it seems to "just back away" sometimes that really is the best thing to do. Batteries can explode with considerable force, burning plastic and electronics can give off toxic fumes, and water (it's a conductor folks!) is the last thing you want to add to an electrical fire.

The laptop and its precious cargo of porn are already destroyed. Just get out of the way and let the nice person with the fire extinguisher do his job.

Interestingly, it looks like there's a power brick and cord next to the laptop. I wonder if it was on the floor by the post because it was plugged in for a last-minute recharge.

Jack Thompson blames it on videogames. If only the gamer who owned it didn't have the urge to charge it up to play Crysis.

Haha, it was funny seeing people reactions though, especially the "OH MY GOD" girl.

OH MY PR0N!

The pr0n was obviously too hot for the laptop to handle...

@SharkByte: So just what CAN you do to help in this kind of situation? The first reaction that comes to mind, extinguishing the fire, may make things worse if that person has no idea what they're doing (water and lithium react violently, which would make this fire worse).

@scoobydoo:
CYBER-terrorists... With yellow vans.

OK, the video's so bad quality that I can't make out how much smoke or fire is visible at the beginning... was this laptop a plant? It's just sitting there, apparently plugged into a power outlet... where's the owner? How come he/she didn't unplug it when it started to smoke? How come the camera man was able to film it so quickly? I mean, yeah people are always filming at airports ("lovely big airplanes") but laptops don't catch on fire often... what are the odds? Sounds slightly suspicious to me.

that was the worst magic show I've ever seen.

@SharkByte: How exactly would you have "helped"? Do you have magic abilities to put out chemical fires with you mind or something? Do you know where the fire extinguishers are located in all airports?

Just what kind of "help" can a bystander offer here other than saying "hey look a fire! Don't go near it!"?

How exactly would you have "helped"?

I would have called Tom Cruise, he's the only one who could have truly helped.