In the pilot's case it may not have been the fear of unemployment as much as concern that he would never be able to fly again. Even if he kept his job he would never set goot in a cockpit again and for a pilot that is a significant loss. Failing a physical means not hetting to something you love that transcends being a job and ghus the temptation to hide something if it meant not flying would be great.

No, but my point was that my comments were based on a real professional's opionion, not the usual /. legal advice. While I realize many people could not afford a lawyer there are avenues for free legal aid available as well.

If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.

The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.

It's subtle what's been "ditched" in later case law. And it's not what you're assuming.

I have to wonder why. That's the environment that fosters the maximum in human diversity, where everyone is the most free to find and do what is their own thing.

So you like an existence of more uniformity and degree of being controlled. I don't. I think even HOA's are frickin' nazis. As if the squeezing every last dollar of resale value is The One True Goal that everyone should have. Fuck that, I bought a home as a place to live, not something to flip, I want to customize it. If someone wants to paint their place Pepto Bismol pink, they ought to be able to.

My problem is I'm a city boy (or rather a suburbs boy) so I wouldn't be content to go live in some remote place just to be let be. That's why I wish the U.S. was split up geographically, for the two political sides.

Because never in the history of the world has any such capability been abused.

And then do what about it? Collectively praying that FSM picks up the plane with his tentacles?

Technology is not a panacea. Add one thing to make flying more safe (locked cockpit doors), create another problem without which a catastrophy could have been prevented (locked cockpit door).

Something I learnt in my first leadership position: When someone has an idea, ask them about the downsides and potential issues. If they can't think of any, they haven't thought it through enough.

Follow the money. Who is asking for video cameras?

The last thing you would have seen would have been a smug face and a victory sign. Maybe not in this crash, but in the next. That, my friend, is headlines material. That's a breaking story right there. That picture is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, even if you print it on the most heavy paper you can find.

I thought I'd never see you write those words. You are completely correct, of course..

The reason for the crushing of liberty is the cash cow. Profit first, politics later.

Unfortunately, while that would have possibly prevented this event it opens the door to other problems because now you always have an access path to the cockpit. The problem was not the door, but the ability of a pilot to cover up medical issues and keep flying along with a single failure point (1 pilot) in the cockpit.

While I agree a video would be useful in some cases I do agree with pilots there needs to be a balance between having information in a crash and creating a permeant record of what happens in the cockpit. Something similar to the flight data recorder where data is overwritten on a periodic basis might be a good compromise. Even so, a video record probably won't add that much information since things such as switch positions, throttle settings, instrument readings etc are already being recorded. Unless something unusual happened, such as with Germanwings, you'll basically just have a video record of who did what your audio and telemetry already says. One question is the cost worth it? Adding a few pounds of weight costs a lot of money over the life of a plane and that also needs to be factored into the equation as well.

As for preventing the Germanwings crash, how would technology such as a streaming videocamera prevent that? The pilot clearly trusted the copilot enough to leave the cockpit so all you have that that point is a video of what is going on but no way to prevent it. The type of technology that might have prevented it, an electronic medical record with automatic notification of employers when a doctor prescribes something that may indicate a lack of fitness for duty or deems a patient unfit for duty might have worked; but that would add its own set of problems nit the least of which is people would stop seeking treatment for conditions that they think could cost them their job.

That's a meme, but also a lie. As IT people especially, we can take a big hint from IKEA in this regards. Their documentation is short, mostly visual, always step-by-step and gives the user exactly the information he needs, with none of the unimportant blabla that many blow up many other documentations from the necessary 3 pages to the actual 30.

If the instructions for Windows were made by IKEA, thousands of IT support people would be out of jobs because users could actually do simple tasks by themselves.

This.

When my girlfriend moved in, we needed some new furniture. The huge wardrobe took three weeks to be delivered, and then one more week to exchange an (important) part that was broken in transport.

We both dislike IKEA a lot, but we went there to buy some dressers. Half of what they have on offer is trash and the other half ugly, but we went home with two pieces of the one dresser that's not a shame to have in your bedroom. Because we didn't want to have her clothes in luggage and bags waiting for furniture to be delivered. It's not the 16th century anymore where people had to go into the forest to chop down trees every time they wanted to have a table.

I would never even give away a program binary, let alone source, because even patents and copyrights aside, someone could use your code in their business and if something goes wrong, they could claim it's your fault and you cost them x thousands of dollars and then try to recover it from you in a lawsuit. I don't need patent reform, I need legal immunity; something like a good samaritan law for software.

.NET is dominant on the Windows platform. After over a decade doing C/C++ on Win32, I finally had to switch to it several years back. Except for specialized stuff where the extra speed actually matters, no one is developing applications on Windows at this low level anymore.