If I was working out my last couple of weeks, and IT put their fileservers on read-only for me just in case I decided to act like a dick, I would be deeply offended. And I would walk out of the building and not return.

Well that all seems pretty above board - I wonder then, given how hard it often is to retrieve the black boxes - why commercial passenger planes don't stream at least some of their flight data back to a central location somewhere?

Yes of course they do.

The Arduino tools are appalling, literally the worst development environment I have ever used. And I've written code in emacs. I do appreciate that many of the competing products are a little bit too complicated, but that Arduino thing is a shocker. Surely there's a middle ground somewhere?

The forums are... well.. not very helpful.

To be fair though, the library support that ships inside that dreadful "IDE" is quite good.

You could do that with all the other ones too. TI's Launchpad, Freescale's KINETIS board, STM have their discovery boards. They all let you blink some LEDs in a matter of minutes - and the Arduino ones are the most expensive. I rather suspect that most people don't do much more than blink some LEDs anyway, since doing anything much more complicated than that with the Arduino "IDE" is an extremely painful exercise indeed.

His point was wrong. It should have read:

"Cockpit video camera will not help determine the cause of any crashes. Including this one."

All that will happen is that you'll see them on the news.

No. Thanks.

Bingo. Follow the money.

Is this still true if you're flying over the pacific ocean at 500 miles an hour? Or are you talking about your cable bill?

How come? Do they turn blue or something? I bet he looked perfectly calm and controlled while he set the autopilot to "crash into the ground" mode.

It sounds to me, from reading about the incident, that the locked door was less important than the fact that you can't intimidate a planeful of people by threatening them with death aboard a plane anymore. The passengers and crew jumped the hijackers, and that was the end of that. A regular old door that could be opened from the outside with a code would have worked out just the same.

Is it? Why? I would have thought that the existing data is plenty, and that generally speaking airline disasters are not caused by what the interior of the cockpit looks like. How many cameras would you need? Shouldn't you have video feeds from the engines too? Perhaps high frame rate ones, so that we can see what really happened?

Additionally, already the flight data audio recordings are gruesome enough. Can you imagine the videos?

Good Lord. That would work out just great. Solution to any problem of unrest of any form - Guns!

Judging by the moderation on your comment, apparently not.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, in any reasonable forum, would be the end of the debate.

However, this is the internet. So. Carry on.

You mean, like a sign over the door saying "whites only"? Is that what you mean?

This is why:

Is backwards. Ideally no-one would be refused service for any reason, whereas realistically one might be refused service because one is not behaving ideally. In an ideal world, no-one gets turned away.

Thanks. It seems to be going pretty well so far.